The Twitter ‘Scalability’ crisis has been a hot topic online the last few weeks as Twitter.com continues to move from a CMS based code platform to a more robust messaging platform. My having a Server/Hardware background mixed with an ever expanding 10yrs of web development experience has made this topic of interest.
One item in particular that we developers and/or server geeks rarely think about is the presentation of an error message to the front end user. This topic has also popped up online, as the Twitter Community slammed both Twitter’s attempt at a “Friendly Error” message and their horrible down hard un-responsive messages (ie: 500 - Internal Server Error)
Last night I saw the ‘Over Capacity’ Friendly error message for the first time. You Can see it for yourself right here: Over Capacity
This message too is sure to be hit hard with scrutiny from all the tweeple frustrated with downtime on the site. I’d just like to remind them all that, after all, Twitter is a free service! 
If you’re interested Twitter’s Official statement on their downtime, check out the developer blog post: Twittering About Architecture (Thursday, May 22, 2008).
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
SIGEPJEDIToday a link appeared to an Official ‘Twitter Status‘ blog or sorts. These are super small snippet updates of what is going on with the site. Kind of sad really.
There are also a few links to other similar status updates, such as Twitter Ping Uptime.
I find it funny that they’re using Tumblr for the blog, as if maybe they cant even rely on their own servers for such a simple little status update webpage for their community of users.
added these pithy words on
May 29 08 at
6:13 am