Twitter's Problems: Pay Very Close Attention

Twitter is probably the simplest social networking service to understand. You sign up, you "follow" people whom you know or find interesting. You meet more people this way. You find more interesting people this way. You follow them, too. It has a cascading effect.

The result? Take a look at the six-month trailing page-view statistics for Twitter.com as measured by Alexa.org. In the past three months, its traffic has grown by 335 percent. And that's even a conservative look at the activity on Twitter. Alexa measures traffic to Twitter via Web browser. But a huge and growing number of Twitter users access the service via applications such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop on the PC, or Twitterific or Twitterberry on iPhones and BlackBerries.

It all adds up to a data center at Twitter HQ that must be begging for mercy.

As it has tried to cope, Twitter has begun scaling back on the use of its service. It's limited the number of people users can follow in a day. It's disabled and re-enabled ways users can view information. Twitter, which was built with the idea of letting people follow others' updates via cell-phone text message, now won't let you follow everybody by text message (although people at the company have said they'd like to bring that function back).

Tuesday, the company told its users they can't follow many of the Twitter messages and conversations they'd become used to following. It was, they said, too confusing for the users. When tens of thousands of Twitter users began complaining about it Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a note saying they'd try to make everybody happy: "Our product, design, user experience, and technical teams have started brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need."

Key word: "scalable."

Twitter is not linking its decisions to strip functions and tamp down user experience to technical issues. Not directly, at least. But face it: The company doesn't yet have a revenue model and it hasn't announced another round of venture funding. Yet, demands on its ability to process data are shooting through the roof. At some point, something will have to give.

Ten years after the dot-com bubble was alive and well, scaling is still a problem out there. Pay attention to how Twitter handles this from technical, business and public relations perspectives.