ReadWriteWeb

It's such a glorious Saturday here in Oregon but I've been wanting to put this post up all week about Twitter's uptime and its use as a measure of its service.

The connection to the cloud seems distinct as Twitter is simply the leading edge of what we can expect as using Web apps become standard practice for everyone, not just the geeks and influencers.

I am reminded of a conversation I had recently with some people who know far more about APIs than I do. We started doing the math for the synaptic effect when the top 1% of all Twitter users post a tweet.

According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.

Today, Google's Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can't access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.