Development - Thursday, June 12, 2008 9:42 - 2 Comments

My Birth Year Has One 9 Too - That’s Not Special

From Twitter: We Made It!

I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted, but some of us have had some real work to do.  No excuses though, and we’re back in form (hopefully).

I’m a little confused that no one else seems to have picked up on this (except our personal favorite - we heart you), but what kind of statistical ju-jitsu is Twitter trying to pull with their claims that they “made it.”  In the aftermath of the Apple WWDC keynote, they wanted to be open with their customers and let them know how the service performed.  They are so brazen as to say that their uptime was 97.3%.  I know that people have been slamming them in the past weeks for their lack of platform stability, and we’re pretty sure Blaine Cook has promised favors to the boys at TechCrunch due to their repeated calls for Twitter to rehire him, but this is not a victory.

They had one 9 of reliability.  One.  Uno.  Not only are their users happy about it, but they blog about it.  Rejoice is the word I see used.  Oy.  For all you Valley types, on your one hour commute, that’s 1 minute 40 seconds your car just decides to take a crap and stop running.  In your 8 hour work day, that’s 12 minutes and 30 seconds of your computer simply not working.  During your 12 hour heart surgery, the doctor stepped out and stopped working for 18 minutes 40 seconds.  I hope you didn’t need that time back.

I suppose if you reduce expectations so much that you can rejoice in the little things, more power to you.  This brings to mind one of my favorite Homer Simpson quotes: “Kids, you tried your hardest and you failed miserably.  The lesson is, never try.”