Twitter has a problem.  Over the past week, it has been highly unavailable.  It is reaching a point where Twitter is not able to scale up to the demand that is out there.  With Twitter growing by leaps and bounds in terms of users and daily tweets, it will eventually reach a point of critical mass.  As it becomes a major means of communications, especially for the enterprise, downtime is going to become a major consideration.  Twitter as structured today is not equipped to handle it.

I’ve always felt that Twitter would need to distribute its model more.  Twitter needs to become less of a service and more of a protocol or an application, and this could be a way as well for Twitter to actually start making revenue.  Creating a Twitter Server product (think a Twitter Exchange type server) would help alleviate some of the load, allow IT organizations to secure and manage how their organization interacts with Twitter, and provide a source of revenue for Twitter.  It would also begin to distribute the load and provide failover beyond Twitter’s current capability.

Of course, Twitter could eventually sell to a higher-end organization such as Google or Microsoft which would give it the ability to scale on existing infrastructures.  However it decides to look at it, Twitter needs to figure out how to scale to avoid the constant overloads and frequent downtime it is now experiencing.

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