Twitter has a history of killing off features in order to stay up. And it looks like it had to do that again today, in the wake the avalanche of tweets that are flowing in following Michael Jackson’s death. Gone are Search and Trending Topics from logged-in Twitter account main pages.
It’s probably not that tweets that are so bad for Twitter right now, it’s the searching for tweets to get information about not just Michael Jackson’s passing, but also Farah Fawcett’s and Ed McMahon’s. Plus there’s a whole trend of celebrity deaths being erroneously reported that probably isn’t helping Twitter too much either.
Twitter says the features are “temporarily disabled,” but then links to a blog post on a site that is also apparently down.
For anyone who has seen the new Pixar movie, Up, this reminds me of the scene where they have to throw stuff out of the house to make it float again.
Update: Okay, the post is up now. Here’s what it says:
We’ve had to temporarily disable search results from the logged-in homepage of twitter.com (this includes the saved searches and trends shown in the sidebar). We’re working on the underlying problem and will bring back these features as soon as we can.
You can still search Twitter and see the latest trends at search.twitter.com.
Update 2: And after about 4 hours away, the features are back. The fact that it’s now 2:30 AM on the east coast of the U.S. probably helped relieve some of the load.
does twitter need better engineers?
yes.
I’ve talked to a few of the guys at Twitter – really friendly folks.
They have scaling issues, but they’re better at it now than when they initially started with fail whale appearing during prime hours (which really hurt their growth).
If you look at it, you’ll notice once they got the load issues fixed – the service really took off. Meanwhile competitors (or bandwagon hoppers) like Plurk still really haven’t managed to get a grasp of the micro-social niche.
not better, more engineer! And may be less TC coverage in times like these
There’s nothing they can do when they get these huge traffic surges.
I get a lot of traffic at StuffRichPeopleLove.com but nothing like Twitter. It probably isn’t bad engineers but exponential traffic growth. That they shut down features kind of shows they have good engineers that are monitoring traffic patterns and closing it down to keep the service up.
Couldn’t agree more.
i guess they wont be getting that nobel prize now
LOL… may be the prize is for removing features
lol, can anyone give me another example of a site that disables features on the fly during times of heavy usage?
the american highway system
was going to say the DC Rail Metro…..
What does that have to do with an internet web page.
I just tweeted that a while ago
But at least they are keeping the site up – better less twitter than no twitter
Twitter breaks another story!
so much for real-time excitement.
Great Usual Suspects reference… I hope that’s what you were going for
Thanks, you got it
What?
What #2?
What #3?
The number of stories on TechCrunch about Twitter is pretty ridiculous. The reporting on every single thing they do has got to stop. I’ve been subscribing for years, but am about to remove TC from my feed reader. :\
Boo-effing-hoo. Im so sick of primadonnas thinking anyone gives a shit they are teetering on removing the rss feed like TC relies on that one individual to stay online.
Hey Justin. Remove them so I dont have to see your whiney ass remarks you were compelled to write.
The number of comments on TechCrunch about the number of posts on TechCrunch about Twitter is getting boring.
Even the number of comments on TechCrunch about the number of comments on TechCrunch about the number of posts on TechCrunch about Twitter is getting boring.
well im new to this site. i heard there wasnt to many trolls and it somewhat appears that way. i really like it and it has become one of my top sites. so go ahead take it off your rss because just like you left someone else will come.
There are a lot of Twitter topics but TC is here to bring people all the latest Tech news that people are interested in and like it or not Twitter is the hottest topic out there at the moment.
Please…Erlang…Infiniband…Erlang….Infiniband.
Morons.
it was twitter we turned to first before google for mj.. twitter gave us the rumor.. google gave us the facts
Twitter (also) gave us the one-liners/wise cracks about MJ =)
This Michael Jackson tribute is pretty win: http://trollcat...ibute-trollcat/
lol! it looks like closing of stock markets either during bullish or bearish run!
Yeah – at least it’s still up. I’m only posting this to get other twitter people interested in checking out my site because my twitter url link is gone.
Not really. I honestly don’t care if you click my link here. I’m just talking for talking’s sake.
Blah, blah, ranty-blah!
Wow thought I was going crazy. They should have not done that.
while its okay to have done that, a static text saying what they had done in that are would have been good.
typo: in that area
I thought I just saw it a few minutes ago.
hehe i wonder how many of you are software engineers and think you could do better. I love the fact that they cut things off to save on resources in times of INSANE TRAFFIC, im going to add that to my bag of tricks.
I agree. the move made plain sense.
I can do better. They are morons.
This hurts Twitter apps as well. It’s been slow all day
ARGH, just hire some real engineers already. What the hell?
NBA draft this afternoon/eve, too.
why do we need billions of tweets stating the same thing?
May be because millions of news sites display the same news!
different sites, differnt servers. more then 140 characters. more informative.
tweeter should look into redsigning their site, if they want to be a news site.
You clearly don’t get it.
you’re right.
i don’t get it.
it dosent make sense for me to page through hundres of pages and thousands of tweets which basically states ‘michael jackson is dead’.
i don’t get a rush when seeing the same data repeating itself.
there’s got to be a better way for them to dispaly the data.
Well, does this mean the Trending Topics on Twitterrific (the iPhone App) won’t work eventually. Because you can still see the trending topics and see the latest tweets.
Just wondering.
It’s not just twitter having overload problems. So are other sites and even ISPS with the bandwidth hogging.
Twitter needs better engineers, sorry but Facebook has TONS more users with TONS of data and still manages to stay up.
What features does twitter have? O that’s right…
i know. I love Twitter. They should be embarrassed though.
Since when do websites have to close for maintenance?
Please don’t be an idiot.
Facebook has been around 2 years longer has 657+ MORE employees than twitter and brings in 300 million USD/year.
They also have an advanced CDN across many countries and data centres.
They can afford the massive infastrucuture.
Twitter is probably making very little (if any) profit at the moment and has to rely on VPS systems to balance its usage and keep costs low.
Google and Facebook never had these issues and they’ve grown rapidly well. I feel like Twitter is one huge hack that is ready to collapse on itself. The engineering team seems like they are hacking stuff together just to get things working.
That’s what you get for hiring kids to do a professionals job. At least they figured out a way to keep the site up. Time to invest some capital in the infrastructure and replace the firefighter coders.
That’s because they both had lots of money to spend fast, without having to worry about revenue immediately. Maybe in this economy Twitter is not ready to buy thousands and thousands of servers and receive infinite VC funding. I’m a software developer, and it’s not always about engineering.
Well, starting the company with a technology that couldn’t connect to multiple dbs at the time (ROFL @ Ruby on “Rails”), they’ve been playing catch up ever since.
My guess is that they’ve had 0 experience managing bandwidth and/or large traffic bursts before.
From what I read of their tech coverage it sounds like they spend their time playing with languages instead of thinking forward to features and traffic growth.
Why Twitter disabled search ? I was shocked when i seen trending feature disabled.
May be due to heavy rush on twitter about Michal Jachson..
Try Plurk (www.plurk.com), it’s much better than Twitter!
Good, but not better in my opinion!
You can get 1 gig of memory at Frys for about $30…
I think Twitter needs bite the bullet and double their server’s ram.
These are not bad either, a Terabyte of RAM in a box:
http://violin-memory.com/
They dont have servers…
They use virtual cloud computing from what i know… so it scales with usage… just costs.
Seriously MG, all you write about is TWITTER AND IPHONE. WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE.
It does not matter what anyone writes about these days. It is the comments that matter, especially the highly tangential ones. Knowledgipity…
Phew, I am sooo glad Jeff Goldblum is still alive (I bet he is too). The Twitter could have, like, imploded today.
Twitter’s refusal to monetize is hurting its growth.
Com’on, MG, Disabling features on Web 2.0 sites is a pretty common way to stay up.
Everyone from flickr to youtube does this, but you single Twitter out because it’s TwitterCrunch.
Yee hee .. I’m sorry everyone if I broke the Internets this morning, I swear I never touched anyone, err anything .. your honor.
Shamone!
Darn, and I so enjoyed not having to see trending topics in the sidebar for a short time.
All that does is allow people to game the system, take advantage of whatever tags are popular at the moment and push out any old tweet that has nothing to do with the topic, in short it all ends up being rather spammy if you ask me.
seems like they’ve fixed it .
I can see search and trending topics in my account page now
I LOVE everything about Twitter. Please give Twitter news higher priority. I just come here to read about Twitter, who cares about other companies, nothing new anymore. Maybe rename Twitter Cruch sounds really cool.
they’re back up now
Some time ago blogged that Twitter’s killer app was Real Time Criticism http://tinyurl.com/csr7gr. I meant, TV shows at the time. Seems deeply ironic that this TC debate was kicked off by a near-Real Time Obituary and that Twitter itself and then the messenger (TC) become an object of criticism because of this.
By the way, the real technical solution to performance issues is to predict thes huge surges and monitor them using Transaction Performance Management (e.g. Precise, HP and others)
How is that worse than getting overloaded and having a fail whale? I’d say this is a clever way of dealing with the problem. Twitter is for telling the world what you do. Search and trending topics are a nice to have. As I use twitter exclusively with Air clients I didn’t even realise the change.
Read about the failure of Friendster. Twitter learned from Friendster’s failure and is making the site available even during high load times. IMO, its better to have the site available by temporarily disabling the features that put a heavy load on their servers.
Why do we need trending topics anyway? If you are not already talking about the “topic” then you probably have no knowledge, interest, or reason to be adding your two cents worth anyway. Especially when it only consists of “hey, why is (topic) trending?”
Interestingly enough, Google News thought I and my colleagues were bots on our refreshes, and gave us 403 errors while trying to learn MJ’s status.
Apparently Google needs new engineers too?