Twitter's got problems. Interesting article which needs no real summary.

Article credit: Computer World By Juan Carlos Perez

IDG News Service – The recurrent technical problems that have affected Twitter for the past seven weeks have also taken a toll on developers of external applications built for the microblogging service.

Throughout the outages, malfunctions and bugs that began the second week of June and hit their high point during the soccer World Cup, makers of third-party applications have tried to weather the storm while having little or no control over the situation.

The frequent and disruptive technical issues have forced these developers, many of whom generate significant revenue from their Twitter applications, to scramble to appease their angry users, while trying to protect their brands and cope with lost business.

"Twitter API issues in the previous weeks have been terrible for us," said Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of Seesmic, which makes Twitter client applications for various desktop and mobile platforms.

Users always blame Seesmic first since it's their primary interface to Twitter. It's extremely frustrating because there is nothing else we can do than warning users Twitter has problems. It is very damaging for us since users start to look for alternatives, which fortunately have the same problems, but damage to the brand is done," he said via e-mail.

Twitter, founded in 2006, became notorious back in 2007 and the first half of 2008 for its lengthy outages, but since then it steadily improved the reliability of the service. It had been having a particularly solid 2010 until June rolled around.

"It had been really stable for a long time and then this just came up as a bit of a surprise," said Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, which makes a client application to manage accounts from Twitter and other social media services.

At various points since the problems started in early June, a very apologetic Twitter has blamed the problems on a variety of factors, including massive traffic spikes caused by World Cup games, internal system bugs, server upgrades gone wrong and faulty network configurations.

"It's been a bit disruptive and frustrating because many people don't know if it's us or Twitter, and they'll just assume it's us. Then we have a communication issue we have to address," Holmes said in a telephone interview.

Although the issues have dropped in frequency and intensity in the past two weeks, some developers remain doubtful of Twitter's ability to provide a consistently stable service…….read more at http://www.wisdeo.com/articles/view_post/7326

Tags: twitter

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