The Twitter Team Responds to Criticism

Most of the social geeks out there are more than aware of the recent Twitter issues that have been happening off and on for a week or so now. Slowdown, errors, and even complete downtime have plagued the popular update and communicating medium, and like all good tech nerds, many were frustrated by the downtime and dysfunction. Thankfully, the good group at Twitter responded to the complaints and downtime, and have apologized as well as explained the real problems that are causing the inconveniences for both users and the Twitter team.

The first thing that AL3X over at Twitter said was that the problems aren't just surface deep. "Throwing more machines at [the problem]," as he explained, just won't do it. The misconception many users have is that Twitter has a proper and working system and architecture, and that more computing power is really all the group needs to patch up the issues.

The problem is that Twitter has been forced to do just that; "patching" the issues with more hardware and instrumentation has only been a band-aid fix to a very real problem that lies beneath the surface, which is faulty architecture. Though Twitter is used now as a messaging system, it was originally designed with architecture best befitting something more oriented towards content management. The resulting issue, then, is that as Twitter has evolved and become much larger and communication-focused, the small team of ex-Googleites hasn't restructured, only patched.

Instead of starting over from scratch, the Twitter team plans to replace certain portions of the architecture over time to best meet the requirements of Twitter and its user community today. AL3X also said that the Twitter group really appreciates and listens to all the feedback users leave, and that user recreations of Twitter help the team understand both better ways to approach architectural improvements and the functionality users are looking for.

Even though Twitter has caused a few frustrations here and there, its much easier to deal with the difficulties when you know the Twitter team is working to address the heart of the issue and digest user feedback.