Twitter at a crossroads once again

From CNET News.com: Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that "from a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been (the company's) worst month since last October." It's a big embarrassment for a company that, over the past year or two, has managed to clean up its reputation for technical instability and one-upped critics this spring by unveiling a business model that looks like it might actually work.

"Last Friday, we detailed on our engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we're facing record traffic," the post by Twitter representative Sean Garrett read. "As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes."

These "deeper issues" tap into something that's, well, even deeper than that. Twitter may soon be faced with a choice: become a long-lasting, crucial part of the Internet's fiber, or continue down a path toward corporate profitability that could seal its fate as more lucrative but less legendary?

In his blog post, Garrett insisted to concerned Twitter users that ultimately, these changes will make the service more stable. For its 190 million users, that's a small reassurance. Many of them weren't yet using the service in its much less reliable days and hence won't be quite as forgiving about how far it's come. But this is the smallest part of the issue at hand: Twitter probably won't fall victim to a Friendster-style exodus of fed-up members leaving for greener pastures. It's bigger and has achieved cultural resonance far more significant than Friendster had when it "lost out" to the likes of MySpace and Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook's attempts to make members' "status messages" more public and more searchable has not curbed Twitter's growth.

The real problem with the fact that Twitter's ability to stay afloat is still under question is highlighted by its occurrence during a summer in which two massive global news stories have already taken root--the growing disaster following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and on a less dire note, the quadrennial FIFA World Cup soccer tournament. When there are big headlines of international interest, it's understandable that more news junkies would gravitate toward Twitter more frequently, and more media outlets would want to harness it as an easy way to tap into conversational zeitgeist.

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