Using Twitter over the past week or so has been a very frustrating experience. The site takes a long time to load, its features either intermittently or permanently don't work, updates get lost, and, due to the site's miserable uptime, its third party applications don't work either. For a time, every second person's update complained about Twitter's uptime (or lack thereof) and some suggested a mutiny.

Hugh from Gaping Void probably sums up the collective frustration best with this cartoon.

I am not condoning the fact that an internationally popular site has been operating at half-speed for an extended period. That said, we've had problems with speed and uptime in the past and our developers always work incredibly hard to fix our problems as quickly as possible. However, what has arisen from Twitter's problems is an excellent case-study in good public relations.

No one who goes near Twitter's website (as opposed to desktop applications) can claim that they don't know what is wrong with the site or what the Twitter team is doing to fix it.



This area, right under the update window, is where Twitter has displayed all of its downtime information. Additionally, a message about IM updates also appears under your current status. Very hard to miss.



Finally, another message appears at the bottom of the page when one tries to look at older updates. (Note that you can view older updates if you type in the URL manually.)


I've heard many unflattering stories about the people behind the site's architecture and it's very easy to sit around and complain about others' mistakes. However, development problems aside, there's a lesson in the jovial, open and (dare I say) "moz"-manner with which Twitter has kept its users in the know. I mean "moz" in its original sense, of course.

They've brought some humour to their epic screw up. Whilst it's still going to annoy you that your desired page won't load, this is going to piss you off far less than a generic 500, 503, or any number of other error pages:



Well, if you're inherently cranky, a flock of birds carrying a whale in a net might not appeal to you. For me, however, it acknowledges the frustration most people feel when something they want to use won't work.

The company has also posted more than one blog post on their issues. Yes, there are some nasty comments on these posts, but the intent behind keeping users up to date is commendable. Another thing I've been impressed with is the site's ability to keep its word as best it can: on Saturday evening, a notice on the Twitter homepage indicated that the site would be down for ten minutes. Ten minutes later, it was back up.

Compare this with sites like MySpace who lie themselves silly in their error pages. This sort of condescending behaviour only leads to creative Photoshop jobs like this and this (NSFW). Lately, I've had better luck at getting answers out of Facebook about their errors (after an issue I had with a misplaced spam warning, I got two replies from a real, polite, human Facebook employee), but nothing I've seen recently has compared to the good public relations I've seen from Twitter.

Additionally, I appreciate their technique of releasing features back into usage slowly so as not to go down completely. Of course, the optimal situation is not to have any error messages at all and maintain a fully-functioning site, but if you must go down, do it with some class.