If this were a normal day on Twitter...

Monday, April 21, 2008 by Dave Winer.

It wouldn't be a normal day, because tomorrow is the Pennsylvania primary and a lot of polls are coming out right now, and they're presenting an interesting story. But that story can't be told, because our main communiation platform, Twitter, is down.  

Yes, it serves me right, and I, of all people, know better, than to build a network on a single point of failure, depending on one company, that is known for producing unreliable systems in an industry with incredibly thin skin (how can they get better if they won't listen). In other words, this is hardly Murphy's Law, it was easily predictable. It was likely. 

In my own defense, we were lulled by months of relatively reliable service from Twitter into believing they were on the path to even more reliability. I stopped encouraging potential competitors to enter the market, now look where we are. No second source (Pownce, as much as I like it, is not a replacement for Twitter, neither is FriendFeed, though I thought they might be, but they said they weren't interested when I visited with them).  

We need some big infrastructure companies to get into this game. One is not good enough. We also need standards so that tools that are built to work with one work with the others. There's no time for a standards body, so if you're getting into this business, please, just use the Twitter API, as imperfect as it may seem.  

No matter how reliable Twitter seems in the future I won't change my mind about this. We need them to have serious competition, so we have a Plan B when something like this happens, which it will, not a matter of probability, imho. 

Update: A new strategy for dealing with Twitter outages. A "rainy day" RSS feed of downtime tweets. Important if you depend on my twitterings.