Rewrite it in C. That'll be faster than Ruby on Rails. :) - Morton Fox
Start admitting what the problem is without having TechCrunch force a response out of them. That's my biggest peave. - Zach Flauaus
Andrew I liked 2. Keeping the community in the dark, the best -- I think if we had some kind of response from Twitter that would keep us less on edge. We'd go have a coffee, chill and come back later. Instead, we're at our computers refreshing every 30 sec, racking up our nerves - Shey
I'll kick it off. Communication. We understand outages. They happen. I think they need to take a more pro-active approach with honest communication. Tell us what happened, and let us know you're working on it. I understand you can't do that for every single outage everywhere, but I believe communicating with users will aid them understand the struggle of scaling the service. Silence is the worst thing a service could do in this situation. - Bwana McCall
If Twitter hasn't already done this -- they need to devise a plan to build scalable architecture; from scratch if necessary. Then during a few low-usage hours 3-5 days a week, put the site down for maintenance. Personally I could deal with that. - Shey
Exactly. What I feel like has been happening is that Twitter hasn't be very respectful of us as a community. Is there any other major (major because of the population who uses it) social sites which just go out like a flash? And if they did, they would be dead. - Andrew Dobrow
@Andrew Pownce did occasionally, but at least they usually had a cute little page with Admiral Ackbar saying "Ack... Something's wrong!" - Zach Flauaus
Shey and Bwana hit the nail on the head. Let us know that stuff is jacked up and that you acknowledge our discomfort. Let us know you're working on it and it's not a ploy to gain publicity....let us know SOMETHING - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)
I think they have to start with communication with their users. Just tell me what's going on, and I'll be patient. As an IT guy, I understand outages. I've seen servers swallow hard drives, patch cords go bad, power outages, database queries that bring servers to their knees... you name it. Just talk to me. - Harvey Simmons
Maybe they could tweet everyone about an outage...oh wait ;p - Kevin Bondelli
Even like they did the other day with the little maintance message they put up. If they set up a black box server to just run that message whenever they go down, I'd feel a hell of a lot more respected as a member of the community. - Andrew Dobrow
Twitter should implement solid communications strategy for planned outages - duh! - Susan Beebe
Twitter should scale their IT to meet burgeoning demand of new users; prepare IT infrastructure to better handle "caching" which we know has been a sore spot in the past. fix it now and scale it to match future needs. - Susan Beebe
twitter should provide a user driven product development "feedback" website like Dell and Starbucks did to receive, review, compile and prioritize user request and implement them!!!!! - Susan Beebe
Ok, FriendFeed could implement my consumer driven product dev feedback website idea too!! hint, hint! (mobile ver please!) - Susan Beebe
Sorry - but until Friend Feed gets rid of this eye-bleeding grey text, expect to find me on Twitter first, here second. No Twit-out for me - but thanks for reducing the load tomorrow, it should make it a bit more stable over there. :\ - Lucretia Pruitt
Lucretia: use Firefox and then learn about the "Zoom" feature to make text bigger. - Robert Scoble
FF is not "continguous" enough yet. FF is not only just as difficult to follow as Twitter, with different subjects scattered all over the place, but also more difficult to scan quickly (compared to Twhirl and other Twitter clients). An interface like Snackr's would be useful, given the "broadcast" nature of twitter. - sage brennan
It would be better to define a twitter protocol so alternate interconnected systems could emerge. - Lon via twhirl
FF looks like that old-skool, uglier-than-ugly "outline view" feature that we used to use in Microsoft Word, back during the Clinton Administration. But I fully support the Twit-Out concept: these twits need to get their act together. And learn how to communicate, as a company. - sage brennan
Distribute load on dedicated servers for SMS, IM, Mobile and Web UI. - israel
Thanks Sage you've got the vision for the #Twit-Out ! - Susan Beebe
Lose the Single Points of Failure, of which there are apparently several. Decouple things so that maybe I can continue to "send" updates even if the back end isn't distributing them properly. Or so that the East Coast servers still work even if the West Coast servers don't, etc. Have a rollback contingency that doesn't involve restoring from 8-track tapes. Um, and don't roll out major updates at 1 in the afternoon even *if* most of your customers are in Japan. :-) - Karim
