The Twitter and The Turtle - Who’s the Slowest?

Twitter is the biggest social networking website besides Facebook that, according to recent stats on statisticbrain.com , has 55,47,50,000 members! You may also check out detailed reports at that link. Everyday on average 1,35,000 more users are signing up.

With this amount of traffic it is important to have a very good level of traffic handling. This is where the web masters of twitter are badly failing again and again. This is not a very young situation. It has been going on since at least a couple of years now. Though not justified yet comparing it to Facebook there is a big difference. Facebook users have never seen this much of slowness in page loading, etc. ever. It is also not unknown that Twitter frequently displayed traffic overload errors. This does not happen now.

The question is why twitter is experiencing such traffic overload problems. The answer could be found in the Twitter API’s that is used by numerous apps that update status of users without even opening the browser. Since Twitter allows updating a text message like status with limited characters its users hardly ever open their browsers for it. The apps they use instead can cause mass spamming and inefficient handling of tweets. It’s an irony that short text messages are supposed to generate lighter traffic naturally than uploading hundreds of images all day.

Facebook on the other hand is more suitable to be used on a browser. Also, Facebook users don’t update their every action during the day like “I am going to sleep”, “I am having a headache #wutthehell”, “lots of work #huahua” or “I love my dog” LOL. Since, FB is used more for sharing pics that are not updated as frequently as short text status. Also, Facebook provides a chatting feature that keeps many users busy when they are not updating their status. On Twitter however “chatting” is largely synonymous with “tweeting” and has a forum like approach. The difference and effects should be clear now.

Also, some people have pointed out flaws in the Twitter API itself that have been causing these slow loading problems. I am not sure about that but that could be the reason indeed.

As of today I logged in to tweet and it loaded fine without any slowness. I really hope guys there have solved this problem finally because we love Twitter a lot!