Been doing a little fiddling to ijy.cc last night, and noticed that twitter.com was down...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
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