Why Twitter is flailing in Romania/Bucharest

I have next to given up on Twitter because it runs like a 100yo Dacia and provides no relevant info unless you want to voyeuristically check out who is flirting or luncheoning with whom in the online/advertising biz.

However, it strikes me as interesting to revert to an argument that Rodrigo made during his talk at last year's Netcamp where he mentioned scalability and purpose. His point was that once you've found a purpose for your app you need to make sure it is scalable so that you do not end up with something everyone wants to use but no one can because your servers are in Desmoynes and we all know Desmoynes is IT illiterate.

Now, Twitter in Bucharest (I fear to presume any other Romanians actually care or use Twitter except Constanta's own Arhi) is giving a lot of people a lot of headaches because it runs crappily. And it seems like a scalability problem to everyone: simply put, too many twitts for Twitter to handle because it just sooooo great.

To me it seems actually more of a purpose problem: initially Twitter was meant to operate as a "let your group know where you are and what you're doing" thing - kindof in the way status fields worked for messenger. This restricted twitts not only numerically but also in scope. I mean how many friends can one have and how many interesting things can one do in a minute? It should have worked fine.

What's happening now is that WE ARE USING TWITTER AS PUBLIC MESSENGER which, naturally, clogs the pipes. Why? Because everyone wants to eavesdrop on your daily conversations and you like to talk A LOT as proven by the 28% time wastage rate due to YM use in corporations.

The matter with Twitter is not that it is not scalable. It is that we are using it for a different purpose than it was scaled for :-)

I wonder if FriendFeed is next or maybe Twitter and YM should exchange platforms.