When FireFox 1.0 was released, the sites hosting this eagerly awaited software effectively were overwhelmed by the number of users attempting to download it.

A colleague of mine referred to it as a Success Failure. What is that? It simply means that you have been so successful at getting the word out and getting people excited about the release that you fail to deliver as a result.

Given the background buzz and increasing frustration of people, it seems that Twitter is having the same thing right now. Question is not so much the cause (broken code? new hardware run amuck? old hardware groaning? a breakpoint in the number of users causing the system to seize up?), but the effect it is having.

High profile users of the service are upset. Regular users are wondering if it’s time to seek an alternative.

Part of the frustration stems from the lack of updates from Twitter itself. For a service that is designed to provide people with flash updates of ongoing events, it appears that they are failing to make use of their own technology and approach. There a semi-secret Twitter Status timeline available (here).

I hope that the team at Twitter get it figured out soon, as I am a new addict to the system. I hate to think that I finally started on this meme at the precise moment that it collapsed.

Ensight and Blog Herald both discuss the floundering and thrashing of Technorati.

My take is that they are having a success failure.

© 2005 GrabPERF

This is how long it takes their servers to deliver on a simple search for “new york”. I have discussed at various points throughout the last week that there are some steps that Technorati could take to try and resolve their Web performance issues.

Technorati Search Content is still, for the most part, relevant for my needs. But I use Google most of the time, and just changed my Pinger to hit Ping-O-Matic to get into more search engines. Also a lot of good talk about IceRocket’s Blog Search tool.

If the Technorati team moves toward selling their services to businesses and corporations (a blog monitoring service), they are definitely putting the cart before the horse. Abandoning your core business to try and appeal to a “broader market” very rarely works.

And why are we having this discussion at all?

Because, dammit, we actually thought Technorati was different.

UPDATE: Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek found this post. [here]

Technorati: web performance, HTTP, Technorati