Report Details Ongoing Twitter Downtime Problems

Most companies try to improve themselves over time.  Twitter, unfortunately, hasn't managed to do so.  A downtime report from CheckMySite indicates that Twitter's still suffering problems on a regular basis, and that it hasn't done well at all in comparison to Facebook and MySpace.

Here's the golden standard (or the norm, depending on how you look at it): Facebook and MySpace both achieved an uptime of 100 percent over the past 14 months, according to CheckMySite.  Twitter, meanwhile, averaged closer to 99.69 percent.

What's more, Twitter's figure for November 2009 - 99.91 percent - is worse than the figures recorded in July 2009, January 2009, and December 2008.  Plus, October 2009 was especially ugly, with CheckMySite pegging Twitter's uptime at just 99.18 percent.

Some folks might shrug Twitter's outages off as a quirk; the failwhale has its own fan club, after all.  Downtime can be off-putting to other individuals, though, and could pose a very serious problem as far as Twitter's appeal to businesses goes.

There's not much else to say on this subject, considering how long downtime issues have plagued Twitter.  The company just needs to sort this out sooner rather than later.

Hat tip goes to Don Reisinger.

Have You Read This?

> You May Get More Traffic From Twitter Than You Realize

> Paid Twitter Accounts To Debut This Year, Stone Says

> What's Not To Like About Twitter's New Retweet Feature?

YouTube Insight, Content ID Come Together

YouTube's done a decent job of winning over content creators and rights holders, and its Content ID system, which lets them identify and profit from user-uploaded clips, has been a big part of that.  Content ID may become an even more popular feature, too, now that a quirk has been ironed out.

A post on the Official Google Blog acknowledged, "Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed."  So random teens who posted clips of Letterman might have access to more stats than CBS.

The post then continued, "But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever - especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them." 

Indeed, the integration of Content ID and YouTube Insight is likely to offer content creators the sort of valuable information about audiences that they often commission expensive studies to obtain.  And now the information will come from an authentic spectrum of YouTube users, rather than whatever small sample a polling firm might contact.

This positive change probably counts as one of several that a senior product manager hinted at earlier this month, so stay tuned to see what else is on the way.