George Parker: The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling… Twitter is Down!

I’ve just spent the last three days in bed with swine flu or something. Well whatever it was, I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for four days, so you know it was bad. But throughout my ordeal, I did manage to catch on to the fact that due to a massive denial-of-service attack by the NKVD, millions of Twitterati were close to despair, if not suicide as they were unable to get their daily fix of every minute, on the minute, tweets. Apparently this also had a minor effect on Facebook, but not many people cared, as Zuckernozzle’s empire is rapidly becoming almost as passé as MySpace, since the popularity of overcoming the literary challenge of telling everyone what you had for breakfast in 140 characters has taken over mankind’s every waking minute. The best part of the whole affair was when Twitter posted a tweet apologizing for being down and saying they were working on it. Obviously it never occurred to them that if the site was down, no one could read the tweet!

But enough piss taking. Let’s think about this in the context of how Twitter is increasingly being promoted as a business platform. You know, all that good stuff about conversations, feedback, building communities etc. Every time you open a marketing paper you read how the Acme Bacon and Pigs Feet Company is going to invest twenty thousand dollars on building a Twitter Community. They’re doing this ‘cos some futurist from PSFK told them it’s how they can engage with customers more directly and get true insights on the potential sales of fatback versus streaky in the Idaho Panhandle. Then a week after blowing all that money, just as they’re lining up a battalion of pigs to be dispatched to that heavenly sty in the sky, there’s a denial-of-service attack because the DNS servers go into melt down when the Radio Shack group starts tweeting as the Shack Mob! Acme is screwed. But the pigs are saved. Temporarily.

The point is, in its short history, Twitter has developed a less than envious reputation for reliability. In the early days it was a victim of its own success. The servers simply couldn’t handle the traffic. But now these attacks are much more serious. Consider that much has been made recently of the way Twitter has enabled protest in Iran and China. Personally, I think a truckload of AK-47’s would have been more useful, but that’s beside the point. In response to activists, authoritarian regimes have easily blocked everything from Google to Facebook to Twitter, but they could just as easily develop massive denial of service attacks to all social networks. Google and Facebook use distributed server networks and can quickly re-route traffic. Twitter uses a single one and can be closed down for days. If I’m the Acme Bacon and Pigs Feet Company, that’s really going to piss me off and make me reconsider Twitter as a viable business platform. It won’t save the pigs though. They’re toast whatever happens.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon and is currently setting the ether ablaze. He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.