If you have spent any time on Twitter you may on occasion get a ‘fail whale’ overload screen…. this is the very reason why Twitter cannot yet match it with the big tech companies.
Twitter is becoming an ever popular site of late. Barack Obama used it to aide his presidential campaign with great success. I have been using Twitter actively for the past few weeks (@kristoforlawson). It is a great site filled with many active users. However this popularity may well be Twitter’s big downfall.
What is the problem?
Suffering under huge strain from the number of people using it, Twitter often displays images of a ‘fail whale’ telling Twitterers that it is over capacity. Now for many people this might not seem like a huge issue, after all the site is back live generally within seconds, but for the success of a site like Twitter this creates a potentially massive problem.
For those who don’t yet know, Twitter is a site based around short messages of 140 characters or less which tell the world what your doing. It is designed to be used on a constant basis as you live your life, and can also be used as a powerful tool to communicate between people. Where the overloading of Twitter’s site becomes increasingly a problem is for both new users, and highly frequent users.
When people sign up to Twitter they initially want to start using the site and getting to know the site. If they are constantly receiving overloading messages there is a chance they wont continue to use the service. They will most likely become annoyed of the constant errors and leave the site for others which can support them without issues.
Frequent users will not necessarily leave the site, but it was only towards the start of 2008 that Twitter was suffering from crippling overloads. Many users know about the errors and are happy to deal with them, but there is a point where it becomes far too difficult to use the site. For instance as I write this post Twitter has been suffering from overloading and technical errors which have made the site unusable for at least 30 minutes. It has also stopped all other Twitter applications from working as they can’t access the feeds from Twitter. This may have something to do with Twitter passing 1 Billion Tweets.
What does Twitter need to do?
Twitter needs to grow up. Now I don’t mean they are immature, but I mean they need to drastically improve their server capacity and ability to deliver their service. At the moment their still playing with the little children. They have proved their service is popular. They have a large audience. They are growing at a fast rate, but it’s time Twitter needs to start moving to upgrade their service to match the big boys like Facebook.
Currently Twitter doesn’t have a way to make money. They don’t have advertising on their site. There has been no formal indication of how they will make money. They are entirely funded by venture capitalists. But herein lies the problem.
If Twitter is to really grow they must find a way to make some serious money. Once they do that then they can start spending serious money on their service. Until that time Twitter has a need to conserve their funds to help insure they stay afloat. While they can and have been increasing their service already, they are doing so measurably. Unlike Google which is constantly upgrading, Twitter is limited in what it can do because of their lack of income.
In reality Twitter needs to really boost their capacity straight away. Now this may be physically beyond them at this stage, however they need to do something immediately.
What really should happen to Twitter?
Twitter needs to sell up to someone else. Facebook would be a good option but they still have their own issues with growing and making money. My choice would actually be for Google to buy them.
Google loves products which are free for consumers, and they have the server power to give Twitter the service quality they desperately need. There is also not a huge rush for Google to make money, they already have plenty in the bank. Twitter would be a perfect addition to Google’s current range of services and products.
Twitter has to do something straight away. They either need to make money or they need to sell up to someone else who can support the service in the long term. If they don’t do something Twitter may be at risk of losing users and halting their increased growth, which would eventually mark the end of such a great service.
So here is my appeal…. Twitter please do something now!
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