As I was working on the next version of TwitBox late last night I started to encounter the dreaded unable to connect to Twitter problems which basically meant that it was time to go onto something else until Twitter decided to get its act together - again.

Then this morning as I was going through my feeds and getting a cranky old body in gear I started seeing among the usual Twitter is down angst a few references to Dave Winer’s post about how Twitter needs to have a go to bunch of its high profile users that it informs of any outages and why they are happening. While I won’t even touch how elitist this sounds - which considering the source isn’t a surprise - Dave does have a germ of a valuable suggestion that Twitter really needs to serious consider.

As I wrote the other day one of the Achilles heel’s of the whole Twitter experiment is its choice of a platform to run its service on. Now I’m not even close to being knowledgeable about Ruby on Rails (which is Twitter’s choice of platforms) but if the problems in scalability that Twitter is experiencing are indicative of what one can expect from the platform they really need to reconsider their options and quick.

Generally the serious Twitter users have been fairly forgiving over all the outages being experienced as Twitter grows. Sure they’ll bitch and moan when it down posting how irritating it is and coming up with all kinds of suggestions but once the bluebird returns they are happy campers for the most part. However over the last little while I have been noticing that the dissatisfaction is lasting longer and getting louder.

This really won’t be so bad if the Twitter crew would just be up front about what was happening during these downtimes but they aren’t. All we get is brief posts after the fact that really don’t tell us anything. So taking the germ of Dave’s suggestion I would strongly suggest that rather than restrict any information with a select few that Twitter get right out in front and let us all know what the hell is going on when things are going off the rails.

Right now Twitter is the darling of the tech blogosphere but we are only a small minority of the larger world of the Internet that Twitter wants to be a big part of but face it Twitter we could make or break you. by keeping us all in the dark about the why’s and wherefore’s of what is not the best idea and could seriously come back to bite you on the ass.

Conversation Tags: Twitter, social communication