Saturday, June 7. 2008
The Freeconomics of Twitter
From Techmeme, a Mr Rafe Needleman writes in to complain about the service on Twitter, and even more, wants to shut it down!:
Twitter is of course a free service, and there are alternatives that he is very welcome to try.
I find it another interesting example of how fuzzy-logic Freeconomic thinking has pervaded the whole Web 2.0 sphere. There is this weird idea in the air that if something is free to user it is free to produce, and thus must still reach all those other norms we take for granted in paid-for services, like reliability, privacy etc.
I believe the term used for this level of irrational economics is called Freetardism, and to Rafe we thus offer our solution - the FreeTardis
Update - I see Mr Stowe Boyd makes a similar point.....
Until the Twitter team can get the service working again for good, here's what they should strongly consider: Close the site. Take it offline. Put plywood over the doors and windows, as it were, with a big "We're remodeling!" sign on the front. Ask users if they want to be e-mailed when the site reopens for business and don't send that e-mail until the thing is fixed. Really fixed. Then have a grand reopening party.
Twitter is of course a free service, and there are alternatives that he is very welcome to try.
I find it another interesting example of how fuzzy-logic Freeconomic thinking has pervaded the whole Web 2.0 sphere. There is this weird idea in the air that if something is free to user it is free to produce, and thus must still reach all those other norms we take for granted in paid-for services, like reliability, privacy etc.
I believe the term used for this level of irrational economics is called Freetardism, and to Rafe we thus offer our solution - the FreeTardis
Update - I see Mr Stowe Boyd makes a similar point.....
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I agree that shutting down twitter is not a reasonable solution.
but i don't agree that it's acceptable that a free service should be down regularly.
this month to date, twitter has only been up about 94-95% of the time according to pingdom.
that's awful and if they don't fix it, something else that is more reliable will emerge that will be more popular.
fred
but i don't agree that it's acceptable that a free service should be down regularly.
this month to date, twitter has only been up about 94-95% of the time according to pingdom.
that's awful and if they don't fix it, something else that is more reliable will emerge that will be more popular.
fred
It is a fascinating phenomena that people are so agitated when Twitter has technical problems. Come on, it's a free service that isn't that important in the scheme of things. It's entertainment as opposed to something that makes you more productive, smarter, efficient, etc. If people are so pissed with Twitter, use Pownce or Plurk.
@Fred - actually, for a free to user service out of alpha that has grown so fast, I think 95% ain't bad.
Fwiw I spent 10 years in the telco back end IP network arena, and the only solution - esp as they now have the money - is to build the parallel scalable messaging system in parallel while keeping the original system going as close to its limits as possible with a combination of system throttling and sorting out fixable bottlenecks - and knife and forking it to optimise service.
By and large they are doing this and as my colleague Andy Wise notes, its better to have a 2m user capacity scaling problem than a no user how do I scale problem
You're right that its an opportunity for a competitor, but Twitter have the money to do it now.
Fwiw I spent 10 years in the telco back end IP network arena, and the only solution - esp as they now have the money - is to build the parallel scalable messaging system in parallel while keeping the original system going as close to its limits as possible with a combination of system throttling and sorting out fixable bottlenecks - and knife and forking it to optimise service.
By and large they are doing this and as my colleague Andy Wise notes, its better to have a 2m user capacity scaling problem than a no user how do I scale problem
You're right that its an opportunity for a competitor, but Twitter have the money to do it now.
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