Born to be Wireless

Most eyes in the tech world are currently on the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld (detailed live updates here for you Apple fans). For those of us not in attendance, Twitter was presumed to be a good outlet to find out what’s going on and discuss each twist and turn with our community. Alas, Twitter has once again crashed under a presumed official surge in traffic from Macworld, and has been largely inaccessible.

Downtime has become par for the course for Twitter during big news events (especially those pertaining to the tech industry, which makes up a sizable portion of the Twitter userbase), with the company having nearly 6 days of downtime in 2007 according to a recent report from Pingdom.

Users have flocked back to Twitter after every outage so far, and there is no reason to think it will be any different this time. But versus other companies that have been hit by notable outages in the past year like Salesforce.com and Yahoo’s small business services on Black Friday, the technical barriers to entry for Twitter competitors are almost nil. Many companies have tried to imitate Twitter so far with little success, but with data portability on the horizon (aka - import your friends into the service of your choice), it wouldn’t take a whole lot to unseat them from their current dominance of the microblogging niche.

Labels: twitter