Critics Call for Closed Doors at Twitter

I can't decide whether I'm more tired of talking about Twitter 's ups and downs or the actual rollercoaster ride that is Twitter's service as of late.  Luckily, I'm not the only person who has to make that decision, and there are plenty of other bloggers willing to weigh in. 

For those who have been living under a social-media void rock, Twitter's service is fairly spotty.  On again, off again.  The Twitter team has gone about the outages in a very open way, putting everything on the table so the community feels informed and involved.  Obviously, as Twitter is a community first and foremost, the idea behind staying open in communication of the issues to the users is so the user community isn't quite as upset by the outages as they might be if the Twitter group was silent.  

That would be fairly typical of any user-oriented community or open source project.  In fact, anything else would seem a bit contrary to the whole concept of a community-based platform.  However, there are some that think the best thing the Twitter team can do is to shut the doors, lock down the hatches, and effectively shut down the project until it is able to operate properly, without interruption.  Rafe Needleman over at CNET says , "I believe Twitter is bleeding users. Every time Twitter users go to Twitter.com or to their Twitter app and they see the "Fail Whale," an error message, or just a non-responsive site, they're that much less likely to come back the next time."

It would seem that Twitter is stuck between a rock and a hardplace.  Obviously users are frustrated with the service outages, and the open discussion about solutions has proven productive.  For instance, some are throwing around the idea of making Twitter distributed , which would effectively solve the issue of service outages due to high use volumes.  Change is definitely in order.  The problem is deciding whether staying up and running is better than shutting down, and will either decision push users to different platforms?

 Needleman suggests that the outages are sending user to platforms like Friendfeed; I am forced to disagree.  If anything, the problems at Twitter have only sparked discussion about improvements that could be made to both platforms. Additionally, in a recent interview the co-founder of Friendfeed shut down any ideas that Friendfeed would try to implement Twitter-like functionality. In my perspective, both are complimentary platforms, and the Twitter-faithful aren't looking to jump ship any time soon.

Though shutting the doors might be the correct solution for a big company that markets a service, a free user community platform like Twitter has to fight it out and keep the doors open to both ideas and criticism.  I commend the way Twitter hasn't folded to pressure, and even with criticism, has continued to be open about the restructuring process.  If anything, doing so is a good statement to the intentions of the group as they struggle over a bit of a barrier in the way of progress.