Over the past few weeks there has been a pretty consistent trend of conversation in the blogosphere surrounding site downtime. One meme that frequently reoccurs is that “Twitter is Down.” Just last night Mike Arrington posted an error message from Twitter which said “We just lost a database about 5 minutes ago and this has severely impacted the site.” That doesn’t sound like to big of an error, right?

This morning when I woke up, the first site I checked out was Plurk. I might be a Plurk addict now but when I loaded the site, it wasn’t functioning properly. I couldn’t update my status and eventually I was prompted with the following error:

I was a little shocked that only 2 days after I started using the service, it was already having scaling issues. Twitter regularly has issues and back when MySpace became popular it was also down every few hours. If you provide a free and useful service, I’m beginning to think that reliability is not as important. While people become frustrated, with not having access to a site, they will still come back later and try again.

According to Compete.com, Twitter saw continued growth last month despite their substantial downtime. So do you think social media site downtime really matters or is it just a bunch of loud people complaining about nothing?

Twitter is still trying to come up with a revenue model but Ian Schafer thinks he has already come up with a decent one. Ian has placed a sponsorship opportunity on his Twitter account. The winning sponsor will get their company on his Twitter page background, his Twitter avatar and a link on each one of his tweets.

With only 450 followers, the bidding on the Twitter sponsorship eBay auction page is already up to $545 with 3 days remaining. I’m not quite sure if this is a gimmick to try to raise his level of followers but this is a substantial amount of money for a 1-month sponsorship. As far as I can tell this is not against the Twitter Terms of Service so Ian may just end up with an extra few hundred dollars to spend.

I’m sure my followers would get angry at me if I kept putting a sponsored link on every tweet. I already catch slack for promoting my blog via Twitter so promoting someone else in addition would probably be crossing the line. Would you sell sponsorship on your Twitter account? How much would you charge?

It has been a hard week for Twitter. The site has been facing substantial downtime. The IM services have been shut down and it appears that tweets are now being throttled. Tonight Twitter has shutdown the service for three hours to update the database. While the message was only posted 15 minutes ago, there is definitely a chance that the service will be down for longer.

Throughout the weekend I haven’t been able to access Twitter via the TwitterBerry application on my Blackberry device. My guess is that API calls to Twitter were not consistently working. On Friday I posted about Twitter’s scaling problems and this is only one part of it. Most successful websites face issues as they grow in popularity but the amount of downtime suffered by Twitter has ranked it among the most inaccessible websites.

Having a service that is extremely popular is not a bad problem to have but the site is losing potential new users as the site continues to go down. Earlier this weekend Mike Arrington singled out Blaine Cook, an ex-Twitter employee, as the source of the problems. In my own opinion it was an unprofessional posting but that’s really not the main issue here.

As most users have pointed out, Twitter is a free service and it’s hard to complain about a service that has become extremely useful for many and will surely continue to grow. While I hate that Twitter isn’t consistently accessible, I’m sure that their development team will soon figure out a solution. With $15 million in the bank, Twitter should soon scale to become a leading communication tool.

There has been a bunch of drama in the blogosphere surrounding a recent blog post by Alex Payne, a developer at Twitter. It was Alex’s response to a bunch of feedback that they’ve received since the increase in service outages on the site. The center of the discussion revolved around the following statement which VentureBeat translated as Robert Scoble being the source of the problem:

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.

Scoble took offense the reference and posted his own furious response on FriendFeed as though it was a personal attack on him. Ultimately this is just some noisy blogger drama but there is an important issue here surrounding scaling social websites. Facebook is forced to limit friends to 5000 people due to technical issues.

While Mike Arrington suggested that the friend limit may soon be raised, there is nothing else to suggest that the friend limit will be increased. It appears that FriendFeed and MySpace are among the few companies that have solved the problem of scaling the social graph. While Robert Scoble can frequently be the source of scaling issues due to his ability to incite mass dialogue, it’s also a great problem to have a great way to resolve bottle-necks.

While Twitter continues to face serious problems, it’s good that it is happening early on with the early-adopters and not late in the game when it could cost them their user base.

This past weekend, while most people were away enjoying the beginning of summer, uber-geeks sat around and discussed the ongoing troubles facing Twitter and how FriendFeed would deal the final death blow. If FriendFeed was consuming most of my discussions nowadays I might agree but unfortunately it has yet to win me over. While FriendFeed is beginning to drive traffic to my sites, Twitter still reigns king and Facebook still beats FriendFeed.

Unfortunately for the early adopters who believe that FriendFeed will become the online leader, there is still the majority that needs to be convinced and currently those people are spending their time on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. I completely understand the benefits of using FriendFeed but isn’t it really just a feature that other social networks sites can easily embed?

In the battle for attention, FriendFeed comes nowhere close to Twitter. Just take a look at the chart below and you’ll notice that the early adopters such as Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmore have an argument which is not based on reality. Conversely, while writing this tirade, I’ve received 5 comments on one of my FriendFeed items. I still just don’t see FriendFeed going mainstream though.

Do you use FriendFeed actively? Do you see FriendFeed successfully competing with Twitter? Are they even competitors?

Twitter has been facing serious downtime problems over the past few days and it sounds like things may be getting worse. Not only is the company facing substantial scaling issues but they are also having general customer service issues. Twitter currently has a highly dedicated base of users that notice every second that the site is down. They also tend to voice their opinion on sites like Get Satisfaction, which I wrote about earlier today.

One such person is Ariel Waldman who has been harassed on the site. She was driven to post on Get Satisfaction following Twitter’s decision to not block a user who was making abusive comments toward her. The result has been a long interaction which resulted in Twitter’s decision to not take any action against the abusive user even though they have the right to.

Twitter is extremely expensive to maintain and without a top tier engineering team working on scalability full-time, it will be a challenge for the site to continue for much longer. Luckily the site has raised another $15 million in funding and will be able to buy more servers to handle the increasing load. This isn’t a long-term solution though and as Nik Cubrilovic points out, “Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find.”

For now users will need to live with shoddy service. This isn’t going to work forever though. Something has to give and it will either be a larger competitor offering a scalable version or Twitter hiring a top-tier team of engineers to handle the problem. What do you think Twitter should do?

For the past week Twitter has been having serious problems. Jack from Twitter posted a cry for help and admitted that the company has no idea what’s going on with the site. That definitely doesn’t sound good and soon after the errors took place, people started complaining about how they feel lonely without Twitter.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks posted a pretty entertaining video of him singing for the revival of Twitter. It looks as though some people had no idea what to do with themselves. Personally, I kept checking Twitter on my Blackberry only to receive no response. Is this the end of the world? Not really but for those who are hyper-connected, it definitely has caused some stress.

While I think Twitter should be more reliable, it’s honestly not the end of my life when Twitter goes down. Mike Arrington seems to differ and appeared absolutely flustered by the Twitter downtime. Mike states, “I’m in a particularly bad mood because I have food poisoning and Twittering it was going to make me feel marginally better because a bunch of people would say something nice in a reply.”

While I’m not as reliant on Twitter for emotional support from others, I definitely see this as a useful way to leverage Twitter. It looks like people have become emotionally attached to Twitter. Just check out the video below.

Yesterday, news surfaced about the new Twitter Blacklist which lists out all of the spammers on the social networking site. That site is not related to Twitter and only has 329 spammers. Considering that there are millions of users on Twitter, I have a feeling that there are way more than 329 spammers.

Jesse Stay did some digging of his own and found out that Twitter will be completely removing spam accounts. They have their own internal list spammers and according to Twitter will completely block those accounts accordingly. Whether or not the company will be successful at banning spam accounts is a whole other question.

For those who thing Twitter spam is a big problem or run into issues with spammers on the site, Twitter has a highly active forum on Get Satisfaction. In there you can report any spammers and Twitter will quickly suspend those accounts. Have you run into a substantial amount of Twitter spam? Do you think this is a big issue for the site and is being followed by spammers really that big of a deal?

Last night, Twitter made a subtle change to their website: you can now view other peoples’ followers. While not significant, I used to frequently wonder why Twitter doesn’t let me see who’s following other users. While browsing through Mike Arrington’s 16,000+ followers or Veronica Belmont’s 19,000+ followers would take days, it helps users get a whole picture of individuals’ full social network.

Browsing through somebody else’s followers is also a great way to find other interesting users. While most people on Twitter still seem to be early adopters and interested in social media, if the site ever goes mainstream, having a complete picture of social connections on the site will be useful in mapping clusters of individuals. Aside from that there isn’t much that can be accomplished by viewing other peoples’ followers.

One feature that would be useful for leveraging the complete picture of the Twitter social graph would be friend recommendations. Twitter has continued to experience explosive growth over the past month according to the most recent Alexa charts. As the site crosses the chasm into mainstream adoption it will be interesting to see if the site can maintain reliability (which has already been highly criticized).

Do you see any other uses for accessing other users’ list of followers?

Pingdom has released their social network downtime report and Twitter ranks atop the list. On a month by month basis though Twitter has been improving their overall uptime. On average Twitter is up 98.72 percent of the time. So if you are noticing all of the downtime by Twitter you are using the service a little too much!

Bebo has also recovered from the substantial downtime they were experiencing when their platform first launched. The social network with the least downtime was MySpace. This is impressive for a site that was once defined by the substantial amount of downtime it experienced on an almost daily basis. While most websites suffer downtime, social networks typically get the most buzz about downtime because of the substantial amount of traffic.

Overall there wasn’t much surprising data in the report. 99.9 percent uptime has become an industry standard for hosting providers and internet users have come to expect maximum uptime from all the services they are subscribed to. One thing to note is the impressive showing from Facebook considering the continued exponential growth that the site has experienced over the past couple months.