It couldn't have happened at a worse time. The up-and-down day for Twitter mirrors the service's bigger struggles as it grapples with technical SNAFUs, a business model, and its blockbuster success. Micro-blogging service Twitter suffered an outage Thursday, just as it reportedly was negotiating a licensing deal with either Google or Microsoft.
First the Downs For much of Thursday, users could post tweets to their own streams, but updates from their followers were scarce at best. It explained in vague terms that "timelines remain stale for users." It wasn't until sites such as TechCrunch started speculating that Twitter had fallen victim to a DDOS attack that Twitter posted an official statement explaining: "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter." At precisely 3:54 pm on Thursday, Twitter was reporting that "Most users are seeing freshly updated timelines. After admitting to a totally unspecified "unplanned site outage" late Wednesday, Twitter waited until almost 2 p.m. ET Thursday to elaborate on the problem. However, due to the previous problems, users of our SMS service may experience some missing tweets." As of about 10 pm ET on Thursday, Twitter hadn't updated its status any further. Now the Ups Meanwhile All Things Digital reported Thursday that Twitter is in talks with both Google and Microsoft about the prospect of multimillion deals to integrate Twitter in some way with outside search engines. A search of Twitter.com under the "outage" search term on Thursday night yielded no new reports of user issues.
News agency Reuters chimed in with a report stating Twitter's discussions with Microsoft and Google are taking place separately, and that if negotiations work out, the potential partners would be able to incorporate Twitter tweets into Internet search results. As I see it, only if the search engines were discriminating enough to combine useful information feeds from Twitter with other search results, while screening out less pertinent data about "what you're doing right now." Still, some type of real-time Twitter trending of topic popularity could help search engines deliver more relevant results. Would users actually benefit from a Twitter partnership with a major search engine? By pairing hot tweet topics with topical search results Bing, for example, could boost relevancy in its search results. The Search for a Business Model, Can Google Help? For example, nobody cares what one individual thought of a movie last night, but if a search engine could generate an instant movie thumbs up or thumbs down based on millions of tweets that could help the movie going public find a movie to see.
The search for some type of practical business model has been a cloud hanging over Twitter's head for some time now. Would service outages plague Twitter if it subsisted on a shoestring budget? Many wonder if the popular service can sustain itself without generating significant revenue. I suspect yes. Huh? Twitter has no fully-disclosed revenue model, yet places its total valuation at about $1 billion.
Meanwhile investors are dumping more money into the service. Flying in the face of conventional business wisdom, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone denied that the company will take on any advertising this year when speaking at 140 Twitter conference in September. It is reported venture capitalists poured $100 million into Twitter recently. He didn't comment on whether ads might appear next year. For many, Twitter has turned into a crucial business and social resource. Twitter Too Big To Fail?
If that is the case, does Twitter deserve a financial rescue should it be in danger of failing? Jay Scott, former content director at COXnet, the Internet arm of Cox Newspapers, points out that many businesses today rely heavily on Twitter and other social networks for promoting products and delivering customer service. Some suggest that the answer is yes. Twitter outages carry social, political, and entertainment ramifications, according to Scott, who is now an independent social networking consultant. On the other hand, depending too much on a single social network has significant drawbacks. Twitter played a significant role in helping Iranian protesters this summer both organize and communicate with the outside world.
If everyone from Madison Avenue advertisers to Iranian revolutionaries become too reliant on one communication tool, what will happen to the world if Twitter never discovers a workable business model?