There’s a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven’t heard any grumbling about that, but it’s worth a bit of a grumble.

What other basic anatomy of communication goes down for 12 hours at a day?

What whether the web went offline for 12 hours at a date? It’s unthinkable, considering the web is built on the Net and is decentralized and redundant. A restricted router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps working.

Same with the phone network. Imagine whether all the cell phones and land lines went down for scheduled maintenence for 12 hours. Again, it’s unthinkable.

Even when there’s a good excuse like a big snowstorm in the east, when the airline system goes down for 12 hours, a lot of public are upset, and it never happens as a scheduled thing.

whether Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I’d switch. I can’t be without e mail for any extended period of instance.

Okay, let’s give the guys at Twitter credit — they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I’d like them to take another step.

Explain to us what these towering outages are for. I can take a guess — something about the

database needs changing, and all the notes in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But that is just a guess.

Another guess — possibly they’ve hired a scaling expert who needs to construct one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to form such a promise, that’s offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. perhaps Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally. whether so, I’d like to know.

Meanwhile it’s fairly amazing that there isn’t a viable Twitter clone out there yet, one that does precisely what Twitter does, and runs all its applications.

I’d additionally like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn’t seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it’s surprising that there haven’t yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space to compete with Twitter.

Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I’m certain they’re doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it’s not good sufficient when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.

Original post by (author unknown)