Same story, different month 4 years ago

Its like you can only pose for so many front-page exposes on your company before you have to start doing some work.  My favorite was when <a href=”http://twitter.com/ev”>ev</a> was talking about how we’ve been spending the past few months building new features for Twitter.  Ha!  I love it.  <strong>Writing</strong> features?!  Fuck that.  We’re taking features away my silly little friends.

Which brings us to the last week or so.  You know, we could get up here and tell you that our SMS aggregator isn’t working so many times before you guys figure it out.  Because let’s be honest; SMS is <strong>not</strong> hard.  The reality is we’re bleeding cash and we figured it would make sense to just sort of randomly drop 40% of our SMS messages on the floor.  Its like roulette now.  Only better!!  Now, we’re the geniuses for cutting costs by a full 15% (yeah, you do the math suckers) and we have the means to wratchet that up or down.  Its just you silly users that suffer.

And then there’s this morning.  “Database upgrade”.  Haha.  OMG.  Who comes up with this shit?!  Oh wait, we do.  Ha!  Because that makes sense.  Let’s do an upgrade on a Tuesday morning PST.  Totally makes sense.  Retards.

Here’s the deal; as you all know Twitter is a <strong>really</strong, really hard problem.  Like harder than porn.  I mean seriously.  140 chars to like almost a million people?!  Yeah.  Think about it.  <strong>1 million</strong> people.

The database is fine; we’re just waiting for our sysadmins to get in (they usually get in at 10:30am or so - its the Valley baby) to “reset” the servers.  In the mean time its motherfuckin’ mimosa’s and Krispy Kremes.

New features, fun but don’t expect change 4 years ago

Sure.  We can’t really keep Twitter up.  We’re introducing new bugs all the time.  Whatever.  Get over it.  Its not like IM and Track have been off since May.  Oh wait.  They have.

In any case, we’ve been hard at work on a bunch of features you could care less about.  You’ll notice a sexy new “Election ‘08” banner across the top of the site now.  It takes you to a version of Summize that doesn’t really do anything you couldn’t already have done before.

Now, we did just realize something after we launched this and we think its at the root of all of this whining/bitching/moaning going on.  You people are all Obamaniacs.  You all want change.  You all demand better.  Well, sorry folks.  We’re runnin’ this like Bush and McCain; a whole lot of the same crap with lots of hand waving.

Logging in 4 years ago

WTF?!  You want to login?!  Jez-sus people.  Get over yerselves.  Don’t you people understand we’re in the middle of a financial crisis?!

We’re blaming that bitch Katie Couric for our latest outage; how could she ask the defender our our Northern Frontier about her experience in foreign affairs.  But we digress.

Missing Tweets 4 years ago

We find it hilariously ironic that you people think you own your tweets.  “Where are my tweets?!” you keep bitching.  Read the TOS you morons; once you tweet it, we can do whatever the hell we want with it.  Including lose it.  Or put it in someone elses profile.  Or reverse the characters or munge the punctuation.  Why?  Because we can.

In all actuality, we had some issues with our cashing servers.  Although this goes against traditional thought on the matter, once you take a big funding round, you can in fact still have cashing issues.  In our case, the cashing has manifested itself as a whole bunch of cocktails and a mega-hangover.  Need we say more?

Can you guess what we’re going to say?  We’re still working to fix it.

Suckers.

Unplanned outage 4 years ago

Its a case of the Mondays but on a Tuesday.  WTF?!

We’re having some “issues” with our “database” so we had to go “offline”.

“Issues” you ask?  Well.  Its rather complicated.  You see.  Our database cheated on us.  I know, I know.  It was embarrassed that we always point the fingers at it and not at ourselves.  It was crying out for attention and we simply wouldn’t listen.  That and we don’t cuddle after sex.

We’ve paged our therapist in for a quick couples (group?) session and hope to have the “issues” resolved soon.  Like any issues like this, the odds are there will be lingering effects for weeks to come.  Get the fuck over it.

Followers and Followings == FAIL 4 years ago

WTF people?!  Okay, okay.  We know something is up and we’re working on fixing so STFU.  Geez.  You’d think you people depend on this service or something.

Here’s the deal.  We think we know what it is.  We sent a bunch of our engineers on a mad dash up to Portland, OR for OSCON because we’d heard (via our latest acquistion Summize no less) that there were a shit ton of engineers up there with all kinds of ideas on how to “do Twitter right”.

Guess what?  You’re all fucking wrong.  We tried doing that C++ application with a bunch of linked lists and either we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing (hint: not likely) or it turns out Twitter is an even harder problem than we thought.  Can you believe that?!

Amazingly there are some pretty smart people here but it turns out not smart enough to fix Twitter.  Google people offered up suggestions.  FAIL.  Yahoo.  FAIL.  Pony-tailed, bearded guy using obscure databases?  Double FAIL.  As such, we’ve proved that there are no smart people that use or develop open source.

We’re headed to Redmond tonight to hopefully get some knowledge from our MS peeps.  Weez out.

Summize acquisition complete, let the sucking begin! 4 years ago

We have finally subsumed Summize and we’re doing everything we can to fuck up the site.  To that point, we’re removing several really handy features as well as generally slowing it down.

Honestly we’re glad we acquired these guys; they were really, really starting to make us look bad.  As an added bonus, its a lot easier for us to find Twitter haters again and we’re continuing to add to our “list”.  That’s right, keep fuckin’ with us.  We know who you are.

Interviews with mean people 4 years ago

This has nothing to do with the status of the Twitter service.  However, it indicative of the grief we pour souls have to endure every, single day.  We work hard to provide less than mediocre service.  You people should be happy with us.

The following are a few excerpts from an interview we did with “Asshole Interviewer” (hereto referred to as “AI”).  We could have let them publish this on their own site but we snuck in the requirement that the interview could only be 140 characters long in the agreement and the guy (Err.  Maybe its a girl?) lost his shit.  Pretty funny actually:

AI: Thanks for doing this interview with me today gang.  I really love the Twitter service but like many users, I’ve been frustrated with the recent outages and abundance of Fail Whales.  What have you all been doing to help fix the situation?

Us: Fuck you.  Nice t-shirt.  You wore a fucking Fail Whale (tm) t-shirt to this interview?!.  Guess what?  We’re trademarking Fail Whale (tm) bitch.  Pay up.  Oh, and you call this a “situation”?!  WTF.  This is a free service for like maybe a million people.  Maybe.  Oh yeah, make sure you make “free” and “maybe” in that last sentence bold.

As for what we’ve been doing, well, that’s none of your damn business.  We’ve been working hard to “increase capacity” and have added many “slave databases” as well as tweaking our “load balancers”.  BTW - make sure to put the buzz words in quotes; we’re not really sure what they all mean but all the blogs we read keep saying we need to do those things.  Wait, why are you writing that down?  That’s off the record.  WTF.  Knock it off.

AI: Sure.  I’ll just leave that out.  No problem.

Us: Great.  Or else its sleep 2 for you bitch.  Don’t mess with Texas.

AI: Alrighty then.  You guys talk a lot about Twitter being a really hard problem.  What are some other hard problems on the Internet that need tackling?

Us: Sweet.  That’s like underhand softball.  You know what’s hard?  Search.  Now, imagine doing search for the entire Internet.  Fucking impossible, right?  I put that in a category right below what we’re doing.  Technically the means to search the Internet is out there, but nobody has …

AI: Um.  Ahem.  What about Google?  Don’t they search the Internet and make it look relatively simple with little or no downtime?

Us: Fucking A man (Editor: or maybe a woman).  Shit.  That’s a good point.  Hmm.  I guess they do make it look pretty easy.  Okay.  Okay.  Wait.  I’ve got one.  Pictures.  Serving pictures for like hundreds of people a day.  Fucking impossible and I’d like to point out, nobody has cracked that nut.  Again, it seems like it should be easy to do but find me one example of somebody doing it well and making it look simple.

AI:  Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterfly, Picasso and SmugMug just to name a few.

Us: Shit.  Damnit it.  I said one.  Geez.  You’re kind of a know-it-all asshole interviewer, you know that?

AI: Hey, you asked.

Us: Guess what?  Sleep 2 motherfucker.

AI: What?!

Us: Don’t worry.  I’m sure you’ll figure it out.  Oh wait, I’ve got one!  Video.  Nobody has …

AI: YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Seesmic, Flickr (again).  Shall I go on?

Us: Fuck you.  This “interview” is over.  Make sure you put interview in quotes in that last sentence.  This does not count.

You know we really, really try here at Twitter. Serving 140 characters to almost a million people is really, really hard.  Harder than search for the Internet, photo sharing or video serving.  Way harder.

Stay tuned for our next couple of updates where we’ll be describing the how’s and what’s of scaling Twitter.

Check us out, bitch 4 years ago

Yeah, we’re a little lippy today.  Why you ask?  Well, it has nothing to do with the fact that like half the company is at FooCamp.  You can’t buy that kind of cool.  No siree.  Two words: up time.  Fuck.  That’s like one word.  Whatever, look at this graph suckers!:

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  How does compare to someone like, say, Google?  It doesn’t.  Google is way better.  But that’s not the point.  Google is lame.  I mean seriously.  Anybody can search the entire internet.  We’re doing like instantaneous updates for the coolest people in the world (hint: if the service goes down over the weekend FooCampers will be sad).

So yeah.  The site is up but it still takes over a second and a half to load.  Cause for celebration?  I think so.

Silly identi.ca, you’re no match for our service foo 4 years ago

Awwww.  How cute.  Somebody thinks they can launch an “open” microblogging service.  Fat chance.  How can you compete with our rabid user base?!  Its impossible.  We beat our users senseless with outages, disabling features and general malaise and yet they still return day-after-day.  You have a lot to live up to my Canadian friends.

It appears this morning that they’re having some issues as identi.ca isn’t that any more.  Its pointing at hewitt.controlezvous.ca.  Now, we don’t know about you all, but we call that a bait-and-switch (and hewitt.controlezvous.ca just isn’t all that catchy TBH).

Our favorite part is the fact that they use OpenID.  C’mon.  Seriously?!  People actually use OpenID?!  That’s cute.  In a sad, hurt, puppy dog kind of a way.

So take that you lackeys to the North!  Running a microblogging service is hard.  Trying to defeat us is futile.  Being open is silly.

We don’t care what anybody thinks.  Mostly.