February 2008
Posted on the 28th at 10:59 PM CST
Twitter Sucks!
Filed under Rants
Filed under Rants
I decided to sign up for Twitter the other night for no reason at all. I have used it a few times since then, and I can appreciate the whole social networking aspect of it. However, I can't help but conclude that this the most idiotic thing that I have ever signed up for. I just don't understand the purpose of writing several short messages throughout the day. Are you going to return several months later to see what you did on Feburary 28th? Oh, and it's totally unstable and slower than molasses! After Googling about it, I noticed on Wikipedia that it is written in Ruby on Rails. LMAO! That explains why the site is down RIGHT NOW!
Another thing worth mentioning is the poor site design. It literally took me four or five clicks just to locate a textbox that I can enter a name to search. When I naturally click "Find & Follow", this is the crap I am greeted with…
I don't have Hotmail or Yahoo or Gmail or AOL or MSN. Even if I did, I probably would not be giving up the password. So I have one other option: send an email invitation. WTF?! How about a textbox to enter a name, and when I press a button, you look in your database of users for a match and display the results to me as soon as possible. Wow, that would be amazingly brilliant for a page with a title of "Find People You Know on Twitter".
I am sure this service gets most of its usage via mobile phones, 3rd party applications and what-not, but c'mon, the web interface should be usable as well. After all, is that not the "roots" of the application?
I gotta say that Twitter and Gravatar give me horrible impressions of Ruby on Rails. I think the word I am looking for is scalability.
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Comment from Josh Stodola
on February 28th, 2008 at 11:24 PM
You know, in the event that I somehow become "hooked" on Twitter, I can really look back at this post and laugh. Time will tell!
Comment from Voyagerfan5761 on February 29th, 2008 at 12:09 AM
There's a username search box at http://twitter.com/home when you're signed in, not that it's particularly conspicuous. I agree, though, that they should have a "Find" page to search their database / import email contacts, and a second "Invite" page for inviting people. It would thus be much easier to find the search box, even if you miss the one on the homepage.
Comment from Voyagerfan5761 on February 29th, 2008 at 12:11 AM
Oh yeah, while I'm here (forgot to mention these before):
1. What blog engine are you using? I've never seen one that uses ASPX file extensions before...
2. My comment above got flagged as spam the first time I submitted it, but got through without modification the second time. Eh?
1. What blog engine are you using? I've never seen one that uses ASPX file extensions before...
2. My comment above got flagged as spam the first time I submitted it, but got through without modification the second time. Eh?
Comment from Josh Stodola on February 29th, 2008 at 7:23 AM
Hi, and thanks for commenting! I am sorry to hear that my spam prevention cause you a minor annoyance. I will try to reproduce the issue and figure out what the problem is. I really hope that your input was preserved and you did not have to type it twice.
This blog engine is a custom one that I built from the ground up. The URL structure is powered by a simple HTTP module. For more info: http://blog.josh420.com/about.aspx
This blog engine is a custom one that I built from the ground up. The URL structure is powered by a simple HTTP module. For more info: http://blog.josh420.com/about.aspx
Comment from Sean on February 29th, 2008 at 1:24 PM
I've never understood the draw of Twitter. I'll stick to my normal methods of communication, thanks.
The link's label could be more descriptive. Their email search sounds like a huge invasion of my sense of security, regardless of the disclaimer they put up. I'd rather not input my email and password on any site other than the provider's.
The link's label could be more descriptive. Their email search sounds like a huge invasion of my sense of security, regardless of the disclaimer they put up. I'd rather not input my email and password on any site other than the provider's.
Comment from Josh Stodola on February 29th, 2008 at 2:38 PM
Who knows, maybe it will grow on me. It's just that my initial impressions have been nothing but hideous. Oh, and the site has been down on 3 different occasions TODAY. And that's just in the 5 times I actually attempted to update, in a 7 hour time span. Ridiculous! RoR is clearly flawed.
Comment from Voyagerfan5761 on March 1st, 2008 at 2:19 AM
It's totally cool that you wrote your own blog engine from scratch! That's the kind of thing that makes me say, "Wow!" I've coded a few things (in PHP, not ASP.NET), but never anything this complex. The about page is very interesting, too. :-)
Re the spam issue: It gave me an error message and put all my input back in the box, as I recall. No worries there!
And Twitter being down the last couple days annoyed me, too. I think the problem is you tried it right around the FOWA conference, which is supposedly the cause of all the downtime (people tweeting from their phones, lots of updates). Twitter's doing a database upgrade tomorrow, which will hopefully make the system more robust. If it goes down again during SXSW, I'll probably eat Twitter's bird for lunch (though I'll still use the service just as I always have).
There hasn't been enough downtime for me yet to make me switch to something else. (I'm on the invite list for Jaiku, which has closed signups in true Google-acquisition fashion.) This is the first week I've had trouble with Twitter, actually.
Re the spam issue: It gave me an error message and put all my input back in the box, as I recall. No worries there!
And Twitter being down the last couple days annoyed me, too. I think the problem is you tried it right around the FOWA conference, which is supposedly the cause of all the downtime (people tweeting from their phones, lots of updates). Twitter's doing a database upgrade tomorrow, which will hopefully make the system more robust. If it goes down again during SXSW, I'll probably eat Twitter's bird for lunch (though I'll still use the service just as I always have).
There hasn't been enough downtime for me yet to make me switch to something else. (I'm on the invite list for Jaiku, which has closed signups in true Google-acquisition fashion.) This is the first week I've had trouble with Twitter, actually.
Comment from Josh Stodola on March 1st, 2008 at 2:56 AM
Voyager, thanks for stopping by! Now that you mention it, a deep fried twitter bird sounds fantastic. Although I always give web sites chances, and I am still going to use Twitter. I am giving it a sincere chance to grow on me. If I get sick and tired of it, then I will stop. Ball is in their court :)
Comment from Adam Kahtava on March 3rd, 2008 at 5:56 PM
Hey Josh, nice site.. I think twitter is pretty cool, it's a great way to spend a micro break during the day, the conversations and cajoling can be fun. If you decide to try it again add me (kahtava). I found this article interesting it talks about twitter and the scalability issues their facing: http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/
Comment from Adam Kahtava on March 3rd, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Something I forgot to mention in the last post... If you are going to use twitter then be sure to checkout some some of the twitter clients like firefox add-ons or applications like witty. Their interfaces are better and make it more fun to use.
Comment from Josh Stodola on March 3rd, 2008 at 7:49 PM
Hi Adam; thanks for stopping by! I have been giving Twitter an honest chance, and I can totally see the benefit of it. The reason this blog post was made is because of the unbelievable first impression I got. I try to give every new thing an honest chance, though. Thanks for the advice on the clients. I will probably give Snitter a try, or I will throw the geek cap on and write my own ;)
I remember you faintly from the ASP.NET forums. Wish I could still contribute my knowledge there, but I was banned. Apparently my suggestions and insight was more than some noobs could handle. Too many people complained, so they banned my account. Boo hoo!
I remember you faintly from the ASP.NET forums. Wish I could still contribute my knowledge there, but I was banned. Apparently my suggestions and insight was more than some noobs could handle. Too many people complained, so they banned my account. Boo hoo!
Comment from Peter Kellner on March 4th, 2008 at 10:37 AM
Twitter was named the number one time wasting site on the interent by someone. can't remember who.
Comment from Voyagerfan5761 on March 4th, 2008 at 10:00 PM
@Peter: I would say that my #1 time-wasting site now is FriendFeed. #2 is my blog, which I spend too much time writing and tweaking.
Comment from Josh Stodola on March 19th, 2008 at 9:39 PM
I think it is catching on to me! It's OK I guess. Reliability has increased. Perhaps I just had a bad first day. If I continue to update on Twitter at least once a day, I will probably integrate my Twitter status somewhere on this site.
Comment from Voyagerfan5761 on March 21st, 2008 at 9:58 AM
Can't say I'm not glad to hear that. What I found amazing was the fact that Twitter appeared to stay up through SXSW. I hear that conference yields a lot of traffic on Twitter...
Comment from Dan on March 26th, 2008 at 9:53 PM
Twitter = <em>celebrating the mundane</em>
c'mon people, level up.
c'mon people, level up.
Comment from Mr. Warshaw on June 6th, 2008 at 12:30 PM
Twitter's problem isn't Ruby on Rails--Twitter's problem is Twitter.
I've used plenty of very useful Rails apps that don't have Twitter's problems, including yellowpages.com and Basecamp. My hosted Subversion account is managed through a Rails app--that works great, too.
I'd be really interested to hear why you think that an application's failures can be directly attributed to its platform.
I've used plenty of very useful Rails apps that don't have Twitter's problems, including yellowpages.com and Basecamp. My hosted Subversion account is managed through a Rails app--that works great, too.
I'd be really interested to hear why you think that an application's failures can be directly attributed to its platform.
Comment from Josh Stodola on June 6th, 2008 at 12:47 PM
Mr. Warshaw: ignorance. That's why. I don't know enough about it. All I know is that it's down constantly, and it runs on RoR. And there is no other rails app out there that gets near the percentage of traffic as Twitter. So, it obviously has severe scalability issues, more so than any other platform that I've seen. Sorry if my rant rubbed you the wrong way, but rails is obviously flawed, otherwise they would have Twitter running by now (or by a year ago!).
Comment from Mr. Warshaw on June 6th, 2008 at 12:57 PM
Thanks for the reply, but I still can't get on board with the direct line between Twitter not working and Rails being flawed. It may well be that Rails is not what Rails isn't the best tool for Twitter (they hinted at this themselves on the blog recently, and the guys at 37signals will be the first to say that it isn't the best tool for everything), but that doesn't automatically mean that the framework is flawed.
While it is possible that the framework <em>is</em> flawed, it is equally possible that Twitter's issues are tied to poor management, poor development, or any number of other things. yellowpages.com, one of the examples I mentioned, presumably receives plenty of hits each day--but it continues to run quickly, and I've never heard tell of any major issues. That leads me to believe that perhaps the Yellow Pages people anticipated a heavy load and built accordingly. The Twitter folks might not have anticipated the load, and fixing a heavily-trafficked production site that might have been poorly built from the ground-up is easier-said-than-done.
While it is possible that the framework <em>is</em> flawed, it is equally possible that Twitter's issues are tied to poor management, poor development, or any number of other things. yellowpages.com, one of the examples I mentioned, presumably receives plenty of hits each day--but it continues to run quickly, and I've never heard tell of any major issues. That leads me to believe that perhaps the Yellow Pages people anticipated a heavy load and built accordingly. The Twitter folks might not have anticipated the load, and fixing a heavily-trafficked production site that might have been poorly built from the ground-up is easier-said-than-done.
Comment from Josh Stodola on June 6th, 2008 at 1:25 PM
Yes, fixing it is easier said than done. Undoubtedly. But it's been well over a year since the scaling issues have become apparent. Twitter is such a simple application, it could have been re-written several times since!
I will agree with you, my arguments for blaming rails are pretty weak and unsupported. However, this is simply the impression that can be expected when something popular performs so pitifully. Twitter's performance issues hurt more than Twitter's reputation. It hurts RoR's reputation. Again, take my opinions with a grain of salt because I do not know very much about Rails. I only know what I have seen.
Best regards...
I will agree with you, my arguments for blaming rails are pretty weak and unsupported. However, this is simply the impression that can be expected when something popular performs so pitifully. Twitter's performance issues hurt more than Twitter's reputation. It hurts RoR's reputation. Again, take my opinions with a grain of salt because I do not know very much about Rails. I only know what I have seen.
Best regards...
Comment from Mr. Warshaw on June 6th, 2008 at 1:54 PM
I will agree with you that it hurts Rails' reputation--if not for a friend encouraging me to look into it further, I would still think that Rails was a very problematic solution for large applications (Twitter was part of why I felt that way before!).
Twitter is a simple application in that it is pretty much reading and writing to a database, but its amount of traffic makes it a more complex animal in a practical sense.
Consider those people who follow thousands or tens of thousands of people (I think they're just Myspace spillovers trying to have as many "friends" as possible for no apparent reason). More importantly, consider those people who are followed by thousands or tens of thousands. Think of all of the db connections that take place just to display the same tweet. Then you have third-party sites using the Twitter API to broadcast the same content in different ways.
I think it's safe to say that at this point, the problem needs to be in the way the database system is managed, not the language or framework that is used to access the database. They can throw more database servers at it, or they can work on server-side caching, whatever--they need to figure out how to manage the load on those db servers, which their blog has indicated are typically the culprits for their downtime.
Btw, I'm all for you not supporting IE6, and I would probably find your "popup" more amusing if I wasn't browsing at work (Bank of America still sticks with IE6!)!
Twitter is a simple application in that it is pretty much reading and writing to a database, but its amount of traffic makes it a more complex animal in a practical sense.
Consider those people who follow thousands or tens of thousands of people (I think they're just Myspace spillovers trying to have as many "friends" as possible for no apparent reason). More importantly, consider those people who are followed by thousands or tens of thousands. Think of all of the db connections that take place just to display the same tweet. Then you have third-party sites using the Twitter API to broadcast the same content in different ways.
I think it's safe to say that at this point, the problem needs to be in the way the database system is managed, not the language or framework that is used to access the database. They can throw more database servers at it, or they can work on server-side caching, whatever--they need to figure out how to manage the load on those db servers, which their blog has indicated are typically the culprits for their downtime.
Btw, I'm all for you not supporting IE6, and I would probably find your "popup" more amusing if I wasn't browsing at work (Bank of America still sticks with IE6!)!
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