Twitter Must Fix Scale Problems

I've been following the commentary on the election results on Twitter tonight, trading messages with Larry Schwartz, Dave Winer and others.

Around 10:20pm EST, Twitter went down for a good 15 minutes or so. They've had a bunch of such outages recently and just let go their head of ops. I'd post this as a tweet, but, umm.. Twitter's down.

Twitter's really getting good mindshare (at least among the digerati) but they could lose it all in a hurry if they don't fix the scaling issues. I hope they get it done because I really like the app, but Friendfeed or someone like Google (who just introduced some Twitter-like sharing capabilities in Reader) could take the business away in a heartbeat.

Royal Pingdom has a great chart showing social network downtime since January. As shown here, Twitter tops the list, down twice as long as the runner-up site, Reunion.com. Good news, I guess, for those looking to cheat on a spouse with their highschool sweetheart, but bad news for those of us using Twitter.  See the chart here:

btw - you can follow my tweets here.

A side note - it really looks as though the west coast still has a lot more fun than us on the east coast. The same group who spent last week waiting for Iron Man to be released were all heading out to a Fast Company party tonight while the east coasters were sitting home watching election results.