Twitter's Problems: Getting Worse

I once told myself I'd never write about Twitter's downtime, because everyone in the tech blogosphere writes about it. Today I'm going against that. The problems have simply become ridiculous.

Back when I first started using Twitter, it was very responsive. (I tried to find my first tweet as an example, but there's currently a paging limit of 10 which blocks everything but the 200 most recent tweets.) Posting was nearly instantaneous, the API allowed 70 requests every hour, one could get replies to one's own tweets using a convenient tab on the site or simple call to the API, you could add keywords you wanted to track and have matching tweets sent to you (via IM or SMS), and you could even use Twitter via IM alone!

Utopia Shattered

Now all that has changed. With the thousands -- nay, millions -- of new users that have joined over the last several months, plus the increases in highly tweetlific (tweeting prolifically) power users, Twitter has had lots of downtime. There's been more downtime than I could possible list here; even linking to reports of that downtime is something I'll leave up to the reader (search for "twitter is down" in Google and see how many results you get).

Not only has the service gone down a lot, but many features have been crippled or disabled. The API is limited to 20 req/h out of the original 70 (and has been for weeks); keyword tracking has been shut off for even longer; the IM bot has been offline for so long I can't even remember what using it was like; pagination is limited to the latest 10 pages (of 20 tweets) for each section; the Replies tab has been disabled, requiring the use of search services like Summize to gather responses to one's own messages; the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the most annoying part of all this is the fact that, no matter what the Twitter developers do, the site still goes down. Twitter was founded by the engineers who wrote Blogger, for crying out loud; it should be able to handle a little scaling. But maybe the fact that Blogger engineers wrote the service is the very problem.

Code-Level Problems

The fundamental issue is this: Twitter was written to be a content management system (CMS), not a messaging service. Blogger is a CMS, too. The capability to handle hundreds or thousands of inputs every second is not part of the normal CMS design pattern. Twitter needs to be fundamentally rewritten.

I know I'm not saying anything new; in fact, some of my ideas were inspired or taken directly from other blogs (too many to even begin to remember, unfortunately). It's just that, with today's outage, I realized just how true all the criticisms are. Twitter may disable feature after feature in an effort to reduce the load on the servers that make the site run, but the underlying architecture is a huge (er, very narrow) bottleneck. Technically speaking, you cannot make a messaging system out of a CMS; it's just not possible, code-wise. The two system types have vastly different ways of handling things.

Secondary Effects

Things might not be so bad, though, if being written as the wrong kind of service was Twitter's only problem. The excessive load caused by the incorrect architecture has caused other technical failures in the system, including the loss of an entire database about a month ago and, just this morning, an overloaded load balancer (how's that for irony?). But at least they launched that nice Twitter Status Blog so they can tell us that they're down after we've already known for half an hour.

Conclusion

If I didn't love Twitter to death I'd probably have given up on it by now. Lots of people already have. The latest darling in the social media space is Plurk, which I personally can't stand (the UI is ugly). I like Jaiku better, but it's been invite-only ever since being acquired by Google, which means it's hard to get an account. Pownce is just too weird for me. All I can do for now is deal with the ridiculous bugs, outages, glitches, and all the other crap we Twitter users have to deal with. Then, during the downtimes, I can hope that when I get back in August, Twitter will be back to normal.

If only I had any confidence that it'll happen that quickly.

Update (08/17): Well, actually, Twitter got a whole ton better over the last six weeks or so.  After continuing to use it for almost two weeks (back in normal, twhirl-using mode), I'm finding the upped API limit (100 req/h) to be absolutely great, and the site is much faster than it was in June.  Looks like a lot of my complaints from this post are no longer relevant.  Yay!  I just wish that some people (*cough* possible248 *cough*) hadn't moved to other sites in the interim...

Blogging vs. Social Life

I've found a pretty compelling trend in the last few months. As my social life in the "real world" space has expanded, this blog is one of the things that have suffered. Whereas a year or two ago I was writing posts a mile a minute (especially last Fall), posting is now spread out over increasingly long periods of days and even weeks.

I'm really not sure what to make of the trend, but I do know it's there. Whether it's a universal constant or something peculiar to me, I don't know. Perhaps Twitter has something to do with it, as well; I do a lot of chatting on there, along with writing short little thoughts that would never do as full blog posts.

Another thing that seems to have been affected is my focus, both in terms of my ability to concentrate and the scope of topics I cover here. This blog started as a small personal journal over on MSN Spaces (now Windows Live Spaces), moved to Blogger, became a technically oriented publication of fact and opinion, shifted more toward opinion, and is now becoming more of a personal journal again (sans most of the intimate details, because people who know me actually read it now).

Now, as I blog in the shadow of my looming departure next week, I'm finding less and less inspiration for posts. Sure, I have a list of ideas, but it seldom gets additions or subtractions any more; the ideas are more "someday" and less "do it now".

This coming school year will be my last of high school, should all go according to plan; it may also be the first in which I find myself thinking more about what's happening outside regularly scheduled things like classes and less about the classes themselves.

It does seem strange that having more of a social life has diminished my own desire to blog. Perhaps that lack of drive stems from the simple fact that I have more places to express my opinions. Why go to the trouble of typing up a few hundred words, later, when you can simply talk with a friend about it?

Hopefully I'll be able to find a better balance between my social life, school, and blogging this coming year. After all, my social life isn't going to go away.

Grammar Photo from Chicago Published

Image via WikipediaIt's pretty well-known in my circle of friends and family that I'm a grammar nut. While I was in Chicago in April, at Union Station [right] on the way back to Minneapolis, I saw a great sign at the check-in desk. I submitted it to Bethany Keeley's "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks a few days after I got back, and this morning I got an email that she'd posted it. I have another email in requesting a correction of my display name and blog address (lack of numbers and extra [incorrect] tracking data, respectively), but that photo is mine.

So head on over to "except special people" (not my headline or text, though; just my picture) if you're into grammar. If you like that, I'd suggest subscribing to the site, because that's what Bethany posts. The vast majority of posts are photos from user submissions, so get busy with that camera!

Very Belated Summary of "Working" Production

I know it's been ages since I last published on this blog (or on any blog, really), and even longer since the show actually took place. I'm really sorry about that; last week was spent fooling with the end of school, and this week (still on-going) has been lots of socialization and more dealing with the end of school (most notably the computer I'm using, which has to go back by Wednesday [realistically, earlier, because of shipping]).

Aside from everything going on in my own life, I've been remembering the scheduled posting bug from a week ago. I don't know if it's fixed yet. We'll see. I haven't seen any updates from Blogger about it. So I don't know whether this post will even publish when I want it to. But it'll have to be a gamble, because I can't hold off writing this any longer. [Update (06:12): It didn't publish automatically... Somebody please fix that bug!]

Image via WikipediaOn May 31, I participated in a production of Working, the musical by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, based on a book of the same name by Studs Terkel. I played the roles of Rex Winship (CEO, I believe, of an unidentified corporation) and Tom Patrick (a fireman). Two very different characters to be sure.

The full list of characters and songs we did went like this (in show order):

1. "All the Livelong Day" (all)
   
2. Mike Dillard - Ironworker
3. "Traffic Jam" (all)
   
4. Several office workers
5. Amanda McKenny - A project manager
6. Rex Winship - "Boss"
7. Pam "Babe" Secoli - Supermarket checker
8. "I'm Just Movin'" (Babe and Checkers)
   
9. Roberto Nunez - Supermarket bag-boy
10. "Un Mejor Dia Vendra" (Roberto and, er, me with no character name)
    
11. Conrad Swibel - UPS man
12. Kate - Housewife
13. "Just a Housewife" (Kate and two other housewives)
14. Roberta Victor - Hustler
15. Grace Clements - Millworker
16. "Millwork" (Grace)
17. "If I Could've Been" (all)
18. Frank Decker - Truck driver
19. Heather - Telephone operator
20. Sharon Atkins - Receptionist
21. Enid DuBois - Telemarketer
22. Delores Dante - Waitress
23. "It's An Art (The Waitress)" (Delores and Customers)
24. Tom Patrick - Fireman
25. Ralph Werner - Salesman
26. Charlie Blossom - Rebel (?)
27. "Something To Point To" (all)
    

We were having some weather that day. First rain, then hail, then high winds. Our director delayed the show due to the weather, giving our audience more time to navigate the storm. The tornado sirens went off later, during the performance. Which freaked out about half the cast.

Despite a rough start (the whole cast, practically, was late on a dance move in the opening number), the show went pretty well. It was still rather unpolished, but I think that may have added some realism. We did have a lot of energy through most of the performance, and the audience didn't notice any of the few very tiny glitches that happened. The workers' monologues all had a lot of feeling.

Hey, I even got through the dances! Remembering dance steps is, for me, like climbing Mount Everest. For comparison, remembering song melodies and lyrics is like sleeping. I must be a very musically inclined geek. Or a very geeky musician. One or the other. (Or neither; there's something to be said for me liking to write and act, as well.)

After the show, we had a sort of cast party at my house. We got four other cast members plus a few outside friends. The show was short enough that my mom managed to tape a good chunk of the party, encouraging reprises of musical numbers in a capella style.

I hope to eventually get both Working and the recent Performance Company show digitized and uploaded to Google Video, so I can share links with family and friends who couldn't make it. That'll probably take a while. If it takes until after my stay in Evanston, IL, don't be surprised. I have to get my dad to do the capture and encoding, as he's the only one with the hardware, software, and available storage space necessary, but he's quite often busy.

So, there's my summary. I'd summarize the show, but Wikipedia's already done a pretty good job of saying what it's about. The list of characters and songs we kept (above) should be enough to personalize our particular production.

By the way, if you want to hear songs from the show, I found a student- or faculty-maintained (can't tell which) page with links to MP3s. That page might change in the future, so listen now if you want to. If it disappears or changes to no longer include Working material, please post a comment below.

SPAMfighter Tagline is Just Spam to Me

This is what I was doing while I was supposed to be finishing my coursework for the year. Don't worry, I'm working on homework now; this was supposed to publish four hours ago and didn't, so I tried again. Manually, because scheduled posting is temporarily borked.

Image by Josh Walker via FlickrSpam is something everyone's heard of, and probably gotten at least a few times. Messages like the one on the right have been going around with different month names for a long time. These are the kinds of things most of us know to ignore (but somebody must be buying or else the spammers wouldn't bother).

Email taglines have probably been around longer, but they're not the work of spammers. Legitimate companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft (*cough*), and AOL (*cough cough*) have all used advertising taglines on their free email services, and only Yahoo! has so far gotten rid of them. I just wonder how effective they are. Personally, I ignore everything below the signature unless it says "PS".

Tagline ads are, to me, a pretty stupid marketing ploy. When software you've installed on your computer to protect you from ads starts sending out advertising of its own, however, I get very, very annoyed.

Personal Experience

My mother forwarded to me a message from one of her friends. It was a joke about the "ID-Ten-T" error -- I'm sure you've heard it (and if not, just click the link).

Granted, the ID-Ten-T error joke isn't all that funny, but the tagline on the email was worse. See, this friend of my mother's uses SPAMfighter to fight spam. (Yeah, yeah; what else would you use it for, etc. etc.) It has apparently caught 377 spam messages to date.

I'll just paste the whole tagline here:

I am using the free version of SPAMfighter for private users.
It has removed 377 spam emails to date.
Paying users do not have this message in their emails.
Get the free SPAMfighter here: <link snipped>

That, frankly, makes me want to stay as far away from SPAMfighter as possible. I am told that paying users don't have the message, and am then offered a download of the free version, which will cause me to spam everyone I email with that same message.

Do they honestly think I'll download their program if I know for certain that it will do that? Seriously, I hate email taglines. Signatures are fine -- in fact, I have one myself, all of two or three lines -- but ads make me crazy. Especially if the product being advertised will cause me to send out those same taglines to other people.

So, you want me to use your anti-spam product? Limit features instead of tagging my email. Of course, I don't need an anti-spam product anyway because I have Gmail's spam filters. :D But not spamming your users' innocent contacts with ads would be a nice touch.

As a side topic, while I was composing this post, Zemanta showed me a couple of my own screenshots from Wikipedia as image suggestions. Cool!

Two Types of Friends: A Found Poem

I did not write this. It sounds so cold to say it, but I didn't.

Nobody I know wrote this. The same.

The truth is, I don't know the author of this poem. It was posted to the discussion board of one of my courses today, and I thought it so moving I had to post it here. It'll be a good tide-over for my next "real" post.

Obviously I haven't blogged in a while (more than a week). Since the school year is ending, I have final assignments to attend to, and no time to really sit and think about a meaningful post about last Saturday's show. (I'm journaling facts, though, and I'll post the finished piece in a week or two when things slow down.)

So, without further ado, the poem I came here to post:

Two Types of Friends – Real & Simple

A simple friend has never seen you cry.
A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.

A simple friend doesn’t know your parents’ names.
A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.

A simple friend brings a bottle of wine to your party.
A real friend comes early to help you to cook and clean.

A simple friend hates it when you call after he has gone to bed.
A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.

A simple friend seeks to talk with you about their problems.
A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.

A simple friend wonders about your romantic history.
A real friend could blackmail you with it.

A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest.
A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself.

A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument.
A real friend knows that it’s not a friendship until after you’re had a fight.

A simple friend expects you to always be there for them.
A real friend expects to always be there for you!