At the price of sounding like a broken record, discussion about Twitter being “mission critical” or too important to have down time is a red herring. The fact is that what is really needed is for more Laconi.ca servers and connectors between them, Identi.ca, and Twitter. Email works because there are few single points of failure. Yes, those of us who primarily use gmail get grumpy when it goes down, but there are lots of alternatives.
So while Twitter made headlines this week because the U.S. State Department asked them to delay their downtime to help people posting news from Iran, this isn’t Twitter’s problem, it’s ours.
This all adds up to the Twitter Conundrum. The owners of Twitter and other social-networking sites aren’t likely to buy highly available, highly secure, redundant systems and storage of the type common to 24 by 7 production data centers. Their business models simply won’t support big enterprise gear. But does that stop the federal government from stepping in and saying “sorry, you can’t go down right now, not even for a few hours?” No. Twitter, YouTube, and FaceBook have created windows on the world, windows that could in fact change the world for the better. You can’t fail (whale). Here’s the conundrum: No one presently pays a fee for posting to these sites. You get what you pay for or, in this case, you don’t get what you don’t pay for. You don’t pay for and therefore don’t get guaranteed availability or data integrity. Is the federal government now willing to subsidize Twitter so that it can function like a production data center? Probably not. Are users willing to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service? Again, probably not, at least not in the near future. Owners of the social-networking sites have managed this conundrum by rolling their own. They get cheap, or even better, free infrastructure and make it work. The power implicit in what they do with the scarcest of resources is truly awesome. Now, as they’re sites become embedded in the fabric of society, can they keep that model going? Perhaps, but they will likely need our help. Remember, e-mail was once a frivolous application.
link: Is Twitter now a critical app? | Data-driven – CNET News
We’ve become addicted to single point source sites that are the be all and end all for a niche. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter…I know that I’m guilty of this as well, but we need to try to think bigger here. What I really want to know is how Twitter is going to maintain a system where lots of people want to join to at least try it out. Wouldn’t letting or building something more decentralized work better?
Maybe it would have been easier for Iranian protestors get out if they had a myriad of services to choose from and those all talked to each other.
The problem is of course is establishing/nominating a server as the “standard” and ensure that we all play nice with each other.
Gee that should be easy right? 
Tris Hussey is a writer, teacher, blogger, and speaker on all facets of Internet life, WordPress, and social media. He is the author of Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Blogging Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro and Using WordPress.
