Twitter Cofounder Talks Again About Acquisitions

There's no need to start refreshing the Twitter Blog every five seconds; it doesn't sound like any pens are poised over paper at the moment.  However, Biz Stone has made some statements concerning acquisitions that point to more of them taking place in the future.

"That is something we are definitely interested in," Stone said at a press conference in Israel, according to Steven Scheer.  He then referenced Summize, continuing, "We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision."

And Stone also added, "As our attention is grabbed by some of these developers, we will take a hard look at them."

Now (and/or in the next few months) might be a good time for Twitter to make acquisitions, considering that its bank accounts are fairly full and the economy remains on shaky ground.  Critics might grumble if Twitter spends money without first starting to make it - as always, monetization remains a concern - but there are other things, like iffy growth and uptime figures, to consider.

We'll keep an eye on the situation, then.  Just don't place a bet on anything occurring during what's normally a rather slow news season.

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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.

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Why You May Have Gone a Couple Hours without Gmail

If you use Gmail, know someone who use Gmail, use Facebook or Twitter, or read blogs or online news, you probably know that Gmail had some problems yesterday. The service experienced a widespread outage, which lasted for about 100 minutes according to Google.

It's amazing how much frustration can be vented over such a small period of time, but bloggers and Twitterers alike voiced their outrage/concern for the world to see. This is to be expected though. While Gmail is usually reliable, this seems to be a more common occurrence in recent months. It's not a great sign, when the company once guaranteed 99.9% uptime for the service and Google Apps in general.

"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," said Ben Treynor, Gmail’s VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar on the Gmail blog. "Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation."

So what happened to Gmail yesterday? They took a "small fraction" of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades as usual. Treynor explains:

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn't access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don't use the same routers.

He says the Gmail engineering team was alerted of the failures within seconds, and they addressed the problem. Read Treynor's post for the technical details.

Google says they have turned their full attention to preventing this kind of thing in the future, and will be working hard over the next few weeks to implement reliability improvements. They then threw that 99.9% number around again, saying, "Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users."