Twitter Ties Up Loose Ends

Finally we are beginning to see the fruits of the huge boost in Twitter's funding, something that the Twitter team is no doubt relieved to see as well. Granted, saying that Twitter's failure numbers have been drastically reduced is similar to Ford saying that Focus SVT engine fires were becoming less frequent a few years back, but I suppose we'll take what we can get.

Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, wrote a blog post in which he documented the progress the Twitter team was making toward eliminating that much-maligned "Fail Whale." The two major issues facing Twitter right now is handling the efficiency of responses to users' requests and combatting over-capacity errors, something that we Twhirl users are all-too familiar with. Williams had this to say on the improvements Twitter is making to its system:

As you can see, while you had approximately a 1-in-29 chance of hitting a whale nine days ago, you only had a 1-in-2000 chance yesterday. And this is with Twitter handling significantly more traffic and updates.

If I were a gambling man, I'd say the odds against Fail Whales were certainly getting better. Those improvements have come none too soon, as more and more visitors begin using the micro-messaging platform. However, improvements will truly need to pick up steam if Twitter plans on retaining many new users who aren't in it for the long haul, as many long-time Twitter users may be.

Just yesterday I ran into a friend of mine who made it known to me that he'd been following me on Twitter for a while, but he said, "I'm considering switching to FriendFeed because of all the problems at Twitter." I'm no FriendFeed hater, but I took the time to explain to him that he wouldn't be getting quite the same thing he's used to on FriendFeed if he up and abandons Twitter at this stage. Luckily, I didn't have to do much explaining, as he'd read that Twitter's increased funding is being used to improve quality and stability. The whole affair certainly surprised me; I tend not to think of normal friends (the non-internet types) as one who would pick up Twitter on a whim. A happy discovery, if not a little surprising.

After all these special moments that I've shared with the beloved Fail Whale, I'm not sure how comfortable I will be with always being able to tweet and receive tweets at every hour of the day. What will happen to the Fail Whale? Hopefully Fail Whale will go down in the Twitter history books as a much-loved relic, at least once all these issues are rectified and Twitter soars to success. You will be sorely missed, Fail Whale.