In this post at gigaom Stacey H. reports on the Scalability Boot Camp Panel (organized by Blaine Cook of Twitter) at South by Southwest.
Most of the comments seemed pretty typical, but one in particular jumped out at me:
ll the talk about failure led to a discussion about how scalability problems hurt or enhance a company’s reputation …
Cook said the press mentions of Twitter’s downtime as a plus, but the irritated users were obviously a minus. (emphasis mine)
NO KIDDING!
Out of curiosity I looked up Blaine Cook’s description at SXSW:
Blaine Cook is the Architect at Twitter. He is currently building and maintaining Twitter’s real-time backend infrastructure that tracks and distributes millions of updates every day to users on the Web, instant messaging, and SMS.
<rant>
Honestly, how naive is this? What kind of sustainable business is built on irritating customers? (and here I mean an actual business, not some mandated thing like the inevitably dreary offices where most of us end up to license our cars etc. )
This is simply bad business.
The worst part? It’s entirely unnecessary … perhaps even negligent to build an infrastructure that is predictably going to go whump every once in awhile, when your customers (and you) least expect it.
</rant>
Blaine, I realize that Twitter’s scaling and reliability problems have been well-publicized, and that you might just be making the best out of a bad situation, BUT all kidding aside … you really should give us a call.
Build to scale from the beginning … it’s the only way that makes sense.
{ 6 comments }
For the record, saying that the press surrounding the downtimes was a plus was a joke. Downtime is never good, and you should do everything you can to avoid it. However, it’s a misrepresentation to say that you can build something successful without any downtime.
Telephones weren’t reliable until the mid 90s. When Bell made the first telephone call, the concept of laying undersea cables and building global digital switching infrastructure was not only ridiculous (people thought the phone was a dumb idea), but impossible. The success was in trying, not in scaling.
I’m not trying to say that scaling Twitter is impossible. Far from it, scaling Twitter is my day job. However, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a service that makes it easier to find friends for coffee, or find the shortest line for SXSW parties, was a ridiculous idea two years ago. I still get questions about the financial viability of it. Scaling is a commitment, and one you should only make once you’re sure about an idea.
I’ve made no bones about our mistakes. We haven’t done the job as well as we should have. However, at no point were the problems strictly technical in nature, and as Eran is writing over on his blog ( http://www.hueniverse.com/ ) the issues are much more subtle than you’d think.
I hope that clarifies the comments as recorded. Our foremost concern has been and will continue to be ensuring a stable platform; we’ve been working hard on numerous fronts, and that work is paying off. Bad press is horrible, and I’ll be the first to take pleasure in never again seeing a “can Twitter scale?” story, because I think we’ve built something valuable and amazing that deserves to scale.
Small correction: the panel was not organized by Blaine, but by Jakob Heuser (also one of the panelists) from Gaia Online.
jakob was the organizer
@Karen Ziv, dormando: thanks for the correction as to the panel organizer. my bad.
@Blaine: thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’ll put up a follow-up post today.
The post Blaine mentioned is http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi.html
Thanks so much for the URL to the post
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