Over the last 2 days, I’ve had problems getting onto Twitter, and I’m not the only one.
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
In some respects I’m not surprised by the problems, after all its free, and its ridiculously popular, so the hardware needed to run it must be pushed to the limits. Who’s paying for it? I’m certainly not, and in these days of “build it and then figure out the business model” are we expecting too much when we include a free service in our marketing mix.
Twitter are clearly aware of the problem and have recently updated their terms and conditions to “leave the door open for advertising,” Co-founder Biz Stone wrote on a company Web site Thursday. “We’d like to keep our options open.”
Personally I’m not sure that the advertising model is the way to go…
Why should it be free anyway? In my experience, twitter is increasingly filling with spam, with an increasing number of followers being “make a fast buck” or “increase your followers” or worse still.
Personally, I think that if it was a paid service or a 2 tier service with a paid option somehow, I think that would limit following and followers to those that are actually interested, not just those that think that increasing their follower-numbers as the ultimate aim.
Twitter, I believe, is part of the social evolution, and in 2 years time we will laugh and wonder why we thought it was so good. The applications that use Twitter are getting better and more sophisticated; but I wonder if Google’s Wave will make it obsolete?
