Alex and Steve are fond of saying that the Twitter post box should read "Say something interesting" instead of "What are you doing?". Which makes sense - I'd rather not read about your lunch, walk back to the office and subsequent bowel movement. This type of insipid banter coupled with people having tens of thousands of followers and friends has lead to Twitter being increasingly unstable over the past few weeks. Is there an upside to this though?
Speed Matters
Several times Google has admitted that the speed of returning search results is one of the primary reasons that they are so successful successful. Last December Om Malik wrote that the average time for a search is 0.12 to 0.06 seconds. Reaching back a bit further Marissa Mayer mentions that the 0.5 second penalty for showing 30 results instead of 10 was enough to frustrate users into searching less (or at least search less with Google).
Looking at Twitter's pingdom report you can see that their average response time sucks. There's no other way to describe it - when was the last time you waited 5 seconds for an ad-free page to load?
For reference here's the latency of google.ca from a SmokePing installation at the University of Waterloo from May 1 2009 through June 2, 2008. The median response time is 38.7 ms, nearly 70 times faster than the weighted response time of Twitter for the same period.
What does it mean for Twitter?
Tons of publicity apparently. According to Google Blog Search there have been 43k posts about twitter in the past week, compared to 1.6k for pownce and 3.3k for FriendFeed. Also more transparency and openness in the form of a status page and architecture discussion on the official Twitter Developer blog.
I'm hoping the real changes occur with the user community though. In a perfect world (mine) Twitter's recent issues would drive the inane, boring users from the service resulting in only the highest quality and most interesting Twitter posts1. Realistically people who are that dull and uninteresting won't abandon a service just because it's slow, but I'm optimistic that the latency will encourage more thought before writing.
- I'll never use the word 'tweet' to describe a post on Twitter. [back]
Tags: Add new tag, Google, Twitter