Twitter Q&A: Nice Spin, But Lets Focus On Uptime

Twitter has decided on a path of information overkill in response to its never ending uptime crisis with a post to the Twitter Developer blog titled “You’ve Got Q’s, We’ve Got A’s.”

It’s a nice exercise in spin, particularly with an opening that includes the “In the spirit of continued openness and transparency, I’d like to address a number of the questions that came up…” in relation to changes to Twitter’s architecture. Who could disagree with such a notion? It’s touchy/ feely at its best, and Twitter looks the better for engaging in the exercise.

I know some people, particularly on FriendFeed haven’t been overly pleased by the recent wave of Twitter bashing by myself and others. There’s a lot to love about Twitter, but the management of the service, or as the case may be the complete utter mismanagement of Twitter isn’t one of those things. And here’s the thing on this post: I don’t care. The only thing I care about as a Twitter user is uptime, and why it hasn’t been fixed yet. The only thing I want to hear from Twitter, and the only thing that will restore my faith, and those of many other disappointed Twitter users is that the platform is fixed, and Twitter outages will be so rare again that they actually merit their own posts.

But I do have one question for Twitter: you guys pushed Blaine Cook allegedly for scaling issues, but in the months since he left, Twitter actually got a whole lot worse. Was getting rid of Cook a mistake?

I’ll add one thing: Michael Arrington was wrong here, although to be fair only in retrospect, because Cook was doing a better job than those running Twitter now, at least in terms of uptime. And in case I may have kicked Cook while he was down previously (I don’t recall if I did or not, but it was a virtual lynching at the time) my sincerest apologies.