Friday, June 6, 2008

Who really cares about uptime.

We've all experienced twitter's spotty performance, but lately it seems contagious. Nick O'Neill wrote today about newcomer Plurk and its performance problems. Perhaps as O'Neill says reliability and uptime is not that important for a free and useful service. I think we've proven with twitter that a useful service, strong community and rich ecosystem of applications will keep people coming back again and again.

According to Pingdom's uptime overview, twitter's uptime peaked in March at 99.59% and has declined each month since. June to date performance is just 94.7%! Yet twitter is on a significant growth spike, approaching 2M users, according to Compete, up 14.7% in May. So maybe uptime doesn't matter, but it just gives us something to complain/kvetch about.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah, i really hate it when twitter is down. god forbid i have to actually EMAIL you! or imagine if that was down too and i had to walk across the office and go over to your desk. NIGHTMARE! COMPLETE NIGHTMARE!!!

sorry to make fun of the whole uptime issue. it is a real issue. someone told me that amazon was down today for a while as well.

Warren said...

Amazon is reported to have lost over $3M from their outage as sales are $29K/minute!

Because twitter is free, all of our friends are there and the switching costs are high (re-friending and learning a new platform), we keep coming back outage after outage.