I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately and I’ve been able to incorporate it into my daily life as well as integrated into many of my blogs and websites.  I think it’s a great idea and a great service, but in terms of reliability not so great.  I’m hoping that their new investments will really help out the service because I think it brings a great deal of value to my sites as well as sites of others.

Recently since Twitter has been down, it’s slowed a lot of my websites down.  The connection needs to timeout and this can make a website seem extremely slow.  I suppose I could cache results more often, but that defeats the whole idea of Twitter where you want to know what’s going on right now.

I’ve read articles saying that the platform wasn’t really developed with scalability in mind and that they are looking to develop the system using a different architecture.

I think a lot of people don’t take this into consideration.  When I develop websites for clients many people don’t take that into consideration.  Sure if you are a small business with little website traffic or you have a small blog with a few writers it probably doesn’t make a difference.  If you are trying to build the next best social network however you need to consider it now or pay the consequences later.  You could always neglect it now, but look to change that in the future.  You would need to make sure that you do take care of it before you get as big as something like Twitter.

Now it’s a huge task for them since they have a ton of users using it all the time and they are looking to build reliability into a system thats already developed and running.  I hope they have the time and money to fix those issues because it really is a great service.  It would be a shame if I had to remove it from my sites completely.