Twitter’s slow and I’m on TechMeme
I’m on TechMeme with my “I’m gonna have another child” post. OK, now, that’s a bug. Clearly not important and hasn’t gotten many links yet. So, how did it get on there? I think Gabe’s algorithm is counting comments received per hour! I bet Gabe is writing a new algorithm now to filter out baby announcements. :-)
Also, Twitter is damn slow.
One thing that Twitter is going to have to be built for is an earthquake. Now, imagine a sizeable disaster coming to the San Francisco Bay Area. Imagine that Twitter will see 1000 times more traffic that day than it is today. Now you see the problem coming. I hope Evan Williams is thinking about how to make this thing scalable. It’s doubling in number of users every few days according to my followers’ list. Problem is that Venture Capitalists probably aren’t funding Twitter cause they don’t see the revenue.
Big revolutions always start with the stupidest small things.

Powered By
March 5th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
A baby?! Oh my gosh!! Congratulations, Robert!!
March 5th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Congratulations Robert! I’m super happy for you and your wife! =)
March 5th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Congratulations!!!!! Oh this is such great news. I am so happy for Maryam and you. Patrick will have a ton of fun as well with the bambino. Cigars for everyone! ;)
March 5th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Venture capitalist arent funding twitter because its a stupid small thing.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
vrb: Is there an echo in here?
March 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Slow? Is it even up? I decided not to try it until you had mentioned it at least 75 times. Happy “Scobleversary” Twitter!
But I can’t get in. Couldn’t they come up with a better name? I’m used to thinking of “Twit” as an insult.
Maybe I’ll be able to use it with my new Sprint “smart phone” which I ordered with “next day delivery” a week ago.
March 5th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Heh, how DID it get on Techmeme? It almost seems like there was a little engineering on your end… )
March 5th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
) = :)
March 5th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Sure, Twitter is a stupid small thing. Just like SMS was a stupid small thing.
Actually, just like email was once stupid and small too.
I still remember someone in the (London) Guardian about 1994 saying that email would never catch on amongst the populace, because ‘by and large, it’s used by computer users writing to other computer users about their computers’.
March 5th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
macbeach: I get in once out of 20 tries in the past hour. REally really slow.
Gabe: it was the most fun making news I’ve ever had! :-)
So, you’re studying comment behavior, huh? Interesting!
March 5th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Andrew: it sure does seem that all interesting ideas are derided as being stupid and/or small.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Ack!! I have to have a Windows Live ID to comment on your wife’s blog. No thanks, but I did want to say Congratulations on the pending arrival!! Enjoy every minute of it.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
[...] Robert Scoble seems to think that twitter is the next internet revolution Big revolutions always start with the stupidest small [...]
March 5th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
I don’t think Twitter is a new form of blogging, nor IRC, and it’s not an email replacement. It’s similar to SMS in length but with a couple of very big differences; personality spam can work to a degree, but back and forth conversations really don’t.
If you don’t care about who sees what you write and have a very select group of friends, then you could use it to disseminate not-too personal information. You can’t restrict who tracks your post however so this model doesn’t really work once people realise that it’s not private in the way SMS is. For that reason it seems to be heading more towards social commentary or idea generation, you’re getting clumps of people with similar interests (Scoble is pushing 800) throwing up questions, or comments, or ideas and then getting feedback or forks.
Still early days, give it a month to pick up and we’ll see how it shapes up.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I’ll be impressed with technology when tricorders are reality and OSes think and respond. Until then, OS X and BSD will do nicely.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
That’s the biggest problem with Twitter…at times it is almost inaccessible. They really need to improve the performance!
March 5th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Twitter should be run on bsd beowulf clusters spread out over a few different data centers for redundancy and scalability.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
what on earth is twitter? care to explain?
March 5th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Congrats on the baby, and hopefully since you brought it (twitter not the baby) to their attention they will work on the speed thing.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Scoble, I always thought you were gay? Oh well, way to go man.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I only saw it b/c it was on techmeme. Not online too much these days (haha). Congrats to you and your wife Robert!
Kristen K
March 5th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
@11 Yea, well at one time people thought CB Radios were a stupid small thing..and they ended up…uh…well..nevermind.. And weren’t we all supposed to be walking around with Dick Tracy watches by now? Why hasn’t that taken off? ;-). Point it,some things do end up remaining stupid and small, not matter how cool a small set of the population think it is.
March 6th, 2007 at 12:56 am
I guess the best thing twitter could do was create some kind of p2p based client which relais the messages around. As long as they keep is relatively small, don’t put 2 much a burden on one of my machines they would be welcome.
And congrats to you and Maryam.
I just noticed you’re message on Twitter, if I’m correct most developers of Joost are based in Leiden in the Netherlands.
March 6th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Are the Twitter servers in bay area? Hopefully not.
What makes you think you’ll be able to access the web during an emergency?
March 6th, 2007 at 5:53 am
I only looked at Twitter because you linked to it below and it looked busy and time consuming. I guess it is the right thing from some but it would require far more attention from me than I could afford during a regular work day. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
Many Congratulations on pending new addition to the family. Patrick will forever be the cool older brother, what fun! This is really joyful news.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Jeremiah: because the Internet stayed up during the 1989 earthquake. Because I was IM’ing with people only blocks from the World Trade Center during 9/11. Because I was SMSing with Ernie the Attorney who was in New Orleans during Katrina.
Lots of our infrastructure will survive. And if it doesn’t, I’ll just walk to where it did survive to get stories out and in of the damaged area. Have Verizon Wireless, will travel.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:33 am
This is all hype - another “feed the sheep” buzz marketing attempt with the Scoble wolf masquerading as a personal blog.
I’m finding myself in Stefanie’s camp more and more. Why do people constantly fall for this drivel?
March 6th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
[...] Robert, you’re wrong! Twitter is not revolutionary! It more like [...]
March 7th, 2007 at 5:49 am
[...] poi diventare qualcos’altro. Per esempio Robert Scoble, coautore di Naked Conversation, che scrive che “Big revolutions always start with the stupidest small things”. E pensa per esempio [...]
March 7th, 2007 at 9:51 am
[...] usi possibili. O almeno si spera. Robert Scoble, che di Twitter è utente prolifico e molto seguito, ne è sicuro e sposa l’idea del fertile cazzeggio (che uscì he usci fuori anche durante la sessione [...]
March 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
[...] how dare you complain that twitter is slow when you are slowing it down??? You posted 21 times during the last 8 hours, that adds up to over [...]
March 13th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Congrats!!!!
Twitter has been damn slow. I totally agree it needs to be scaled for massive traffic. As it stands it seems it’s past capacity.
March 16th, 2007 at 3:06 am
[...] of SMS providing location, time and activity information. Coordinating activity by location. Robert Scoble and Andy Carvin make the contention that Twitter could save lives in situations like the [...]
August 4th, 2007 at 3:39 am
[...] me this…:: websites … 79. Who cares about Twitter vs Jaiku? | My Broadband ADSL Blogs 80. Twitter’s slow and I’m on TechMeme « Scobleizer 81. twitter « Change Is Good 82. FOXNews.com - Review: Twitter Provides Just Too Much [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 8:37 am
[...] that Twitter, by any reasonable measure, is far from the revolutionary communications tool that Twitter kool aid guzzlers seem to think it [...]