I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms.

OK, they do say it won’t be inaccessible for the full maintenance window, but still, isn’t it time Twitter got enough redundancy that it didn’t need to do this?

While pondering what went wrong, I noticed Twitter now has an official set of widgets for web pages.

Twitter / Get a Widget for your site

They’ve got customised ones for MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, Typepad, and a generic one (in HTML or Flash) for everything else.

What is surprising is that, in this example, 45 people have blindly followed the spammer when they followed them. Do people not even look at who it is?

I mean really. “Jenny” of “online friend”, with such an obviously spammy bio?! Could it be any more obvious that this person intends wasting your time?

Understandable I suppose, given the huge cost they must incur from it. But must be annoying to those who use it.

A lot of Aussies in the initial comments, probably due to the timing of the announcements. Introducing an Australian inbound SMS number would have cushioned the blow.

Twitter is very popular. It has a lot of users. (Including me.)

But it hasn’t commercialised. There’s no ads, no user subscription fees, no deals, and, I suspect, no money. Or at least not very much.

Or at least not much. It’s maintained its independence and integrity, but I wonder if subsequently having no dosh is the reason the service is becoming so unreliable as popularity increases. At least the commercial services out there have been through all these issues.

Some are blaming it being built on Ruby On Rails, which evidently doesn’t scale very well, but this is only a problem if they don’t have the funds and the will to migrate it onto another platform.

It’ll be interesting to see where Twitter goes as more people pile on. Are they up to the challenge? Will they just give up and sell out in return for investment in reliability, or can they find another way forward?