In Defense of Twitter

Twitter bashing has become a bit of a past-time for some people. I don’t think that the criticism leveled at Twitter is fair or accurate. It is generally based on a misunderstanding of the technical problems they are facing. In the case of TechCrunch, it’s a desire to drive traffic to the TechCrunch website by fabricating conflict and making personal attacks.

Twitter has had a hard time scaling. This is obvious to anyone that uses the service, and is readily admitted by the people behind Twitter. The present problems have brought out all of the Armchair Architects, and I’ve seen a lot of commentary stating “I don’t understand why this is so hard, all you need to do is [insert gross over-simplification of the problem here]”. It’s very easy to apply some 20/20 hindsight to this problem, but another thing entirely to be in the trenches day after day working to keep Twitter up and running while trying to make large-scale changes to fix the underlying problems.

Here’s the thing. Twitter was started as a side-project inside Odeo. It was developed in Ruby on Rails, the same tool that they had used successfully to build Odeo. While this choice is a major discussion point for their critics, it seems to me to have been a very reasonable decision. Ruby on Rails was what they were familiar with, and at first glance seems to be a good fit. I suspect most people would have made the same decision, given the same situation. The bottom line: They made the best decision they could, based on what they knew at the time. Keep in mind that nobody even knew whether Twitter would gain any traction - certainly none of them could have anticipated the warm reception it has been given.

Obviously their existing architecture isn’t working. The fine folks at Twitter have figured this out, and they are busy rebuilding the system to handle the current load and scale accordingly. This isn’t an overnight fix - it will take time to rebuild Twitter with all-new innards. Let’s be patient. Frankly, the internet needs to take a collective chill pill on this topic.

If you’re not following me on Twitter, you can remedy that here.