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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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In case you haven't heard, Twitter's been having some alarming downtime due to scaling issues. It's become quite popular and continues to grow significantly in both traffic and users every month. As more and more people come to rely on its unique service, these outages have grown increasingly frustrating and that has lead to a minor cottage industry in the blogosphere: complaining about Twitter and ponying up solutions to help them out of this situation.

So here's what they need to do: shut up and realize that, by and large, they've got no idea what problems the Twitter team is having and no credibility in offering advice. Oh, you thought I was going to join in the chorus. While I have some experience with scaling in working in online banking and then a popular hosted blogging engine, I won't pretend to have any special insight into the problem. Unfortunately, many of my fellow bloggers don't share my restraint.

Just to give you an idea of the scope of the problem, Dare Obasanjo's entry details some of the complications that become obvious after more than a superficial rumination. Some might say that attacking this is easy, but they're dead wrong. What's even worse, the application that the Twitter developers originally built wasn't what it has become.

Second guessing and judging based on insufficient (or absolutely no) evidence is practically the coin of the blogosphere. Twitter needs to fix their problems, but I guarantee that their team cares more about doing so than you ever will.

[UPDATE (5/30/2008): More details.]