The Twitter Scaling Storm

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter's infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.

As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.

I'm a big fan of Twitter but unlike many of my tech friends I am not obsessed with it. I think many Twitter critics have really overreacted to the downtime and slowness because ... overreacting to modest tech defects is what tech people love to do.

My take is that people are not reasonably factoring profitability issues into the Twitter equation. Cook is getting more blame than he deserves because he probably was tasked with keeping things going less than the budget you'd have with a more profitable enterprise.

Twitter has been wildly successful in terms of traffic and adoption, but it has not been monetizing that success. Scaling up to an extremely robust infrastructure could be throwing good money after ... no money. Many bubble companies developed huge and robust architectures to handle trivial traffic and thus I am not at all convinced Twitter is wrong to set their priorities as they appear to have done - a great service with a second class infrastructure until they figure out how to turn a buck from all the Twitterers.