Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime 175
illectro writes "A study on site availability by monitoring service Pingdom shows that in 2008 Twitter greeted users with the 'Fail Whale' for more than 84 hours, almost twice as much as any other site. At the other end of the scale imeem and Xanga managed less than 4 hours of downtime for 99.95% uptime. Myspace, Facebook and Classmates.com were the only other sites studied which managed to stay up more than 99.9% of the time."
84 hours???? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Me either - I've never been tempted to visit twitter and would not have noticed.
However, I have to give them props for the fail whale [designlessbetter.com]. I ran into that graphic somewhere-or-other and it's got to be the single best network-overload graphic I've seen.
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Well, 'social media' IS downtime. So either way, the users get what they are coming for.
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Ten years ago, slashdot was the place where people would come and enthusiastically discuss hot new technology and trends.
Today, the easy upmods come from playing the part of the crotchety old traditionalist who could not care less about whatever new thing those damn kids are into, because if you can't do it with an awk script and a soldering iron, it shouldn't be done!
Oh slashdot, has your spirit died?
All the response this comment needs (Score:2)
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84 / 24 = 3.5 days of downtime.
3.5 x 50,500 = 176750 tweets lost in a year.
Not that it matters, since it's useless.
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I tweet each plop.
84 hours?!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it kind of strange that a site as incredibly simple as Twitter had so much downtime. Granted, they probably don't have the multiple dedicated redundant datacenters to their name like MySpace and Facebook do... but still, they're only serving little tidbits of text.
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holy shit, it's RoFLKOPTr
High write volume.. (Score:2)
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Awww, the poor little rails fan is gonna get violent on the internet. Good way to make a point, hotshot.
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Oh BS. A huge volume of extremely easy data. No images, no War & Peace length text posts. Just a lot of short, sweet, and simple text.
I want you to say with a straight face that it's really just the amazing volume of data that separates a highly reliable and available site like Facebook from a constantly failing jumped up IRC client like Twitter.
Twitter is a dog. And because it's written in Rails, it's a special needs dog that has to go to the vet a lot.
This is nonsense. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem isn't people obsessed with Rails... the problem here is people who just don't like it, for whatever reasons of their own. Well, your reasons *ARE* your own. Please keep them to yourselves unless you can start coming up with facts rather than unfounded insults.
Quote from Twitter representative: "I strongly believe that the
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Well, since we agree that the Twitter people are incompetent, why should their opinion matter? Maybe their love of Rails is the root of the whole problem, and they're just to wedded to the environment to see it.
I personally think it is part of the problem. Development/deployment frameworks add a non-trivial amount of overhead, which is something that cannot be spared on a high volume applications.
Aside from all that, I just love tormenting Ruby fanatics. They're as defensive and strident as any C geek, thou
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I am an anti-fanatic. I use the best tools for whatever job I may be doing. I program in Java, Perl, Php, Python, C++, C#, and, when I must, Cobol. I make fun of everyone who claims that their tool is the best tool in every situation.
I'll tell you exactly what Twitter's problem is: Ruby is a shitty database interface. That's it. So is PHP, so is Perl, so is VB.Net. I don't even like Java and C# for that stuff, though they're a whole lot better. Python is, but you can write a C lib to do it for Python, so it
Hahaha (Score:2)
Ruby interfaces with C libraries as easily as Python. In fact, most "database interfaces" as you put it for Ruby are written in C. As they should be.
There are also many different caching schemes available to Ruby -
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Aside from all that, I just love tormenting Ruby fanatics. They're as defensive and strident as any C geek, though, unlike the C geeks, Ruby/Rails people can't point to any performance increases to justify their fanaticism.
I thought that basically their entire argument was that they can (supposedly) increase programmer performance by some huge amount.
Re:This is nonsense. (Score:5, Funny)
I think that says it all, right there.
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The Twitter people have stated publicly that their technical problems are NOT due to Rails.
While I understand that they say this, how are we to believe that they know what the answer is, when they have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of ability to fix the problem? That suggests to me some lack of expertise, which reduces my inclination to believe them.
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Your ad nauseum argument says nothing, but since some moronic people with mod points are out there I may as well respond.
You haven't said anything specific about rails. There's tons of successful rails deployments out there, just because twitter's engineers suck at what they do doesn't mean the tech they use is bad. Tell me WHY does rails suck? What part of it is causing all these problems?
Also, Twitter isn't just rails, from all accounts the problems they have are from other parts of their stack. Again, no
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I'd point out that your defense of rails is just as silly as the parent's attack. "Tons of successful rails deployments" adds exactly zero datapoints to the argument.
And I'm not going to accept the statement of the Twitter folks that they would use rails again as some kind of argument in favor: a) they've failed, so their decision-making record isn't stellar and b) obviously they're going to defend their decision, since saying "Oh, we screwed up" is practically unheard of these days.
This isn't a troll (real
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You've got a point, to an extent, I didn't make a list of successful rails deployments. Let's fix that with a list of successful rails apps:
http://rubyonrails.org/applications [rubyonrails.org]
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The man who ate 100,000,000 jelly beans did do less than the man who ate 10,000,000 burritos. Not all data is created equal. There are whole worlds of complexity that come in when you have to deal with small data (like text) and large data (like images). You have to separate the handling of the files as much as possible.
Twitters position, where their transactions are always the same types of data in the same amount...Those are very easy to abstract and scale. True scaling problems come in when you're hittin
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Well you misunderstand scalability. Scalable DOES mean you can just throw more hardware at something, as you said. But you omit the part the scalability has limits. There's always a bottleneck, so no app is infinitely scalable. You take your best guess at what its intended audience will be and you proceed form there.
You can say my app's been designed so that it will scale when n is between 1 and 100,000 for instance. Or that it'll scale between 1 and 100,000,000,000,000. But the app you design for the later
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I don't really have enough experience with Ruby on Rails to authoritatively speak on the subject... however it does seem to me that Twitter's problems have been going on for months. In that time, it seems almost inconceivable that they haven't tried to fix it. If they continue to try to fix it and the problem keeps occurring then I can infer that they really don't know where the problem is or how it's occurring.
Now, again I'm neither defending nor slamming their choice of framework, but it does appear as th
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Please stick to the facts rather than baseless insults.
Does it make that much difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Twitter was the worst, with 84 hours downtime, one year is 8765.81277 hours, which means that Twitter was down .958268243% of the time. Not .9 (90%), but .009 (nine tenths of one percent). IOW, it has an uptime of 99.05%. Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! doesn't manage that, and I know Microsoft's download servers don't manage that...
Re:Does it make that much difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Twitter was the worst, with 84 hours downtime, one year is 8765.81277 hours, which means that Twitter was down .958268243% of the time. Not .9 (90%), but .009 (nine tenths of one percent). IOW, it has an uptime of 99.05%. Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! doesn't manage that, and I know Microsoft's download servers don't manage that...
Good numerical point, but Yahoo hasn't failed to load for me any time in the last 10 years, with something like 10-50 page views per day. Their uptime is thus no worse than based 0.99997 on my experience, which is means 300x less downtime than twitter.
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If you drop to 98% availability...Jesus. It sounds good in a non-internet context, but the standard is 3 9's (99.9% uptime) at least. We're not talking 4 9's (99.99%, what you'd expect from your bank) here. We're talking about a site that's pushing 1 9. ONE. 98%!!!
If they were your webhost, they'd be fired. It's just not an acceptable performance number for a big modern site.
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Depends on what time of day it was. If you had your 84 hours at some time where it was only daylight over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you're probably okay.
If you had all 84 of your hours during peak times, and event-driven times (major sports and news events), you just lost a lot of data. More importantly, you pissed off more people for being down 5 minutes than you did by being down for an hour at 4AM.
Given that Twitter has issues that are well known due to capacity, my guess is that their downtime
99% isn't good enough (Score:2)
Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it.
Ahh, the old "99% is good enough" argument. Occasionally 99% is actually good enough but you have to be VERY careful with that argument. It is extremely easy to come up with examples where 99% is absolutely miserable performance. All you need is a large number of transactions or severe consequences for a failure. The former definitely applies here and possibly the latter too once money gets involved.
For example if 99% were good enough reliability for air traffic controllers, each year 640,000 [natca.org] flights wo
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The GP was saying that, all conversions be done, 84 hours is not as devastating as it can sound. That's not saying it couldn't, nor that it shouldn't, be improved.
Mind you, it's a freaking social networking site. How many lives will be seriously inconvenienced (much less endangered) by its downtime?
Money matters (Score:2)
84 hours is not as devastating as it can sound.
If Google was shut down for 3.5 days in 2008 it would have cost them $209 million [google.com] in revenue. A few more days of that and it might become real money.
How many lives will be seriously inconvenienced (much less endangered) by its downtime?
Lives won't but investments will be endangered and that does "seriously inconvenience" people. I present our current economy as Exhibit A. You think Google or Amazon or Yahoo would be the economic powerhouses they are if they were down for half a week per year? Customers wouldn't trust the service, investors would be wary, slashdot would bash them and they
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What about the mental distress suffered by those of us who are anxiously waiting for tweets regarding the twitter repair status? How are we supposed to cope?
and here I am... (Score:5, Funny)
I clicked.. (Score:2)
I clicked the story expecting to see users waste more hours on twitter than other social networks. That would've been more interesting. The story above is... just plain boring.
Twitter doesn't work by design (Score:5, Informative)
I think many of us recognize the potential power of twitter-like thingies. With this in mind I recently joined. It is beyond disappointing.
- the site itself is barren, with basically no features - it is just like a '98 site in a bad way (not in a "Google-like" minimalist way)
- can't get updates by SMS in Europe. OK, fair game, it isn't free. But you should be able to at least post by SMS, right? Somehow although they do offer local numbers (very nice) I wasn't able to actually verify any phone so can't update by SMS
- they had updates by Instant Messenger as official feature for a while but couldn't make it work (why?! at least it should be practically free for them unlike SMS)
- there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party)
- same as above for updates by email
So, yes, nice idea but poor execution.
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- there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party)
The Pidgin Twitter plugin [google.com] works [twitter.com].
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I update it via identi.ca which I update via im. twitter is where most people are at that I communicate with so that is where my posts end up - but I don't ever go to the twitter site. It doesn't need to be more than it is.
Twitter Developer Alex Payne on Rails performance (Score:5, Interesting)
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I mean wtf? This has been dubunked so many times.
After this announcement someone wrote a plugin for rails that handled multiple databases.
And you know, we had this huge ruby on rails application that never really took off. I would had really loved to have those performance issues they were describing.
Re:Twitter Developer Alex Payne on Rails performan (Score:4, Informative)
Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.
That is probably true. However, I would count that as an advantage -- better to deal with them sooner than later.
At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time.
There are many, many ways to talk to more than one database in Rails. In fact, it is possible to swap out the entire database layer of Rails and use another ORM, or no ORM at all. On the bleeding edge -- and Twitter might actually be a good candidate for this -- people have wired up Rails to CouchDB, which provides trivially scalable multimaster replication, and which, being HTTP, can be thrown behind any old load balancer -- which brings this back to a "just throw hardware at it" problem.
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
Some of them do -- a good example would be Symbol.to_proc.
However, Merb proves that this is not actually a Ruby problem, it is a Rails problem. And Rails and Merb are merging some point in the near future.
It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. [...] I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Somewhat true -- after all, Ruby 1.9.1 did double the performance of the language.
But, relative to what?
Turns out that, at least compared to other languages and frameworks (like PHP), Ruby is not slow [slideshare.net].
It's also worth mentioning that while all of the Twitter alternatives may have enjoyed better uptime, they haven't had nearly the amount of traffic that Twitter does. We don't really know if they can scale -- but even supposing they can, Twitter was there first. And while they complain about those nice features being slow, they probably owe their success to those features for getting their product out the door faster than their competitors.
It's also worth mentioning that this interview is almost two years old. Rails changes a lot in two years. In fact, Twitter were early adopters -- two years before that interview, Rails had only just shared commit rights. Two years before that, it didn't exist at all.
It might be worth asking what version of Rails Twitter is using, and if they've noticed a change since then.
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> better to deal with them sooner than later.
Well said sir. Scaling is not about language opcode execution speed. Apps don't scale by eliminating a few JMPs and BEQs here and there. Instead, they scale by coming up with good _architectures_. Caching, partitioning, sharding, queuing, backgrounding... all that stuff. Given a good enough architect you could probably write EBay in Bash.
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Not that those things are irrelevant, just that initially, they are less important.
Certainly, it's possible eBay could save a lot of money on hardware by rewriting the site in a faster language (or even in C) if they started in Bash. It's also possible they would start looking at other optimizations -- all those little hacks you avoid during development could suddenly mean thousands of dollars saved.
But you won't know which hacks are worth thousands of dollars, and which ones will cause thousands of dollars
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Actually, compared to PHP, it is slow. Alot of people benchmark PHP incorrectly. Everyone who knows anything about PHP knows it was built to be an Apache module and never to be used as a command line utility because it doesn't have a daemon
Then you might be surprised by the benchmark I actually linked to. This was a measure in requests per second of a full Web application, not of something silly like fibbonacci.
Nuby developers love to quote this stat but are clueless in the fact that what they are quoting is completely wrong.
Once again: Look at the actual statistic I'm quoting. Are you suggesting this was CakePHP, run as a web app, benchmarked with a web benchmark, yet somehow run as a commandline app?
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I've never used CakePHP before, but every benchmark I find on it suggests that it's horribly slower (10-100x slower, if not more) than stock PHP. For example, over here [sellersrank.com] they get 37.46 requests/s for a hello world CakePHP page on a 3 GHz Intel machine with 512M RAM. I gave a plain PHP hello world page a try on a 1.3 GHz Pentium-M l
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they get 37.46 requests/s for a hello world CakePHP page on a 3 GHz Intel machine with 512M RAM. I gave a plain PHP hello world page a try on a 1.3 GHz Pentium-M laptop
How much does either of those have to do with the real world? That's why I linked to a benchmark of a real (though simple) app, that actually reads and writes to a database...
I mean, I'm sure I can beat your scores with a static page.
What matters is, when you actually start to build out your application's logic, how much do you have to rewrite yourself that you could have borrowed from something like Cake? Are you sure you're doing it more efficiently than Cake would be?
By the time you've built your own rou
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They have tons to do with the real world. It means that, as a baseline, the machine in that benchmark will never run a CakePHP application faster than ~37 requests/s, which is pretty bloody slow.
Will a full fledged PHP app be slower than a hello world CakePHP app? Not even close, at least in my experience. For example, Game! [wittyrpg.com] runs in excess of 100 requests/s on the very modest hardware I mentioned above, and would likely be well over 300 requests/s on the 3 GHz machine in the benchmark I linked (assuming it'
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The point of my post is that comparing to CakePHP is a lousy comparison, because a) CakePHP is a pretty minor player in the PHP world, and b) CakePHP is hideously slow.
Point b, I could have made about Rails -- and it's still not as slow as you would think.
Since I can't get people to actually watch the presentation, let me quote from it:
331 requests per second in a raw PHP app. Static HTML was 1327 rps.
Cake was barely 8, with acceleration.
Ruby, with a single mongrel, was 85 rps. With Passenger and Enterprise Ruby, 96 rps. So already, Rails is close enough that, worst case, you would have to run it on two machines instead of one.
Merb, with templates, was over a thousand rps
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Come back when you understand how benchmarks work Nuby.
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We were talking about RUBY not RUBY+RAILS vs PHP+CakePHP(bloat).
In that case, you might be interested in the examples using the Merb router, which is actually comparable to static content. This was compared to raw PHP, both with echo and with templates.
A real benchmark would at least compare the same code (Yes, like a Fibonnacci) to test how the LANGUAGE and not the FRAMEWORK benchmarks.
A Fibonacci is irrelevant -- when was the last time you used a Fibonacci in a commercial app?
These benchmarks are testing a real app. If that app ends up being written differently in the different languages, I would suggest that this is not necessarily bias, but quite possibly that one language lends itself to cleaner and
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Seriously, you'll learn this when you get out of high school.
Re:Twitter Developer Alex Payne on Rails performan (Score:4, Funny)
does this mean metalhed77 wants to punch Alex Payne in the face? [slashdot.org]
My latest Tweet (Score:5, Funny)
I'm now posting on /. about Twitter.
I live such a full life.
Based on what amounts of traffic? (Score:2)
This is not all that meaningful unless you also completely correlate the uptime info with the number of users/requests/whatnot the site does.
The report doesn't explore that sufficiently enough for me. I can make an app that has 100% uptime if it has one request an hour. Downtime is largely caused (directly or indirectly) by load, so in most cases downtime usually increases as user load (defined as user interaction and amounts of user data, and the actions of those users on that data) increases.
Painting wi
Possible explanation (Score:2)
Maybe there is, somewhere in the world, guy who pays lots of $$$ to ISPs to 404 Twitter site as often as possible. If this is the case, that guy is really rich and his brain works in similar way as mine.
What is the uptime metric? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, Myspace was able to display html in my browser, but it seems a bit far fetched to consider that "uptime".
Zomg stop with the twitter stories (Score:2)
Twitter is on par with Brangelina type stories. Find something more newsworthy to fill dead space with(!!) This is so frustrating.
My favorite social networking site never down (Score:4, Funny)
Twitter's downtime (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey its Ruby" "works better after getting fixed" (Score:2)
these were what some people were saying in slashdot back a while ago about twitter, ruby and whatnot.
use the source (Score:2)
Don't like Twitter's downtime? roll your own [laconi.ca] and do better.
(But honestly, I still don't see what all the hype about Twitter is. It's just a mashup between instant messaging and RSS from what I can tell, not sure why there needs to be a "service" wrapped around it.)
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Twitter is RSS with SMS encapsulation. I'm pretty sure there's a way to express that entire concept in 3 letter abbreviations but I'm not going to wast the effort on it.
Yay fail whale (Score:3, Interesting)
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Birds tweet. They all tweet to each other. And they do so using tin cans and string.
So they're flying along, happy tweeting on their retro iPhones when all of a sudden this doped up whale jumps in the middle of them, dragging them all to their doom.
Birds = Twitter
Whale = system/network load/myth of Rails scalability
It's a gorgeous bit of iconography.
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Architecture? (Score:2)
We know Twitters architectural history, but anyone have a summary of the three big sites with the higher uptime? (Server-side of course). Commonalities would mean a lot I'd think.
Sorry, I'm old and lazy or else I'd look it up myself.
The Real Tragdey (Score:2)
Don't put your eggs in one basket (Score:2)
Join multiple sites. So when Twitter goes down, you can gripe on Facebook about it, and when FB goes down, you can tweet away.
uptime not the same as usability (Score:2)
So myspace hardly ever goes down. They still to this day have issues of not having enough resources for the amount of traffic they get (may be part of the reason that most people I know have all but ditched myspace and went to facebook). Look, if there Are so many people on your site every single night that some people get DOS, and those who do get in cannot do anything, while they have the brilliance to take down resources during peak hours to install untested site updates, then what difference does it mak
Re:They are cut off (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They are cut off (Score:4, Funny)
Go outside, take a sunbath, twitter your friend about it... err, ha, well...
No, what you need to do in that situation is go and create a Facebook group about it.
Re:They are cut off (Score:5, Funny)
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That's the thing. You can't force anybody to follow your twitter feed. Only people who WANT to know what you're doing in minor increments will follow your feed.
Who says that 'social' has to equal face-to-face time? Face-to-face time is not terribly easy to get, what with having to actually travel to your friend's location. Twitter is the same as calling a friend and telling them what's going on every once in a while, except it's opt-in. Only people who WANT to know what's going on in between face-to-face me
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What the readers of the feed think: Having a bunch of feeds to follow is a mildly amusing way to kill time
What the owner of the feed thinks: That he's so awesome/important that people want to know what he's doing at all hours
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So go out and get some sunshine or something.
Pfft. Who needs to go out to get sunshine [wallpaperbase.com]?
'Get a life' as a positive suggestion (Score:2)
I've made a number of technological choices accommodating downtime precisely as a motivator to get out and do something real.
Much as I'd love the always-connected nature of an iPhone, I settle for the iPod Touch precisely because it's not always connected - if I can't get WiFi service, that's a good thing. Blogging is fine, but the rapid update demands of Facebook are more than is worth spending my limited lifespan on. I'm increasingly disliking digital videography, preferring to live the moment than get wr
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Demands? Facebook requires you to update? You must be using a different site than the one I know.
Re:'Get a life' as a positive suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
No kidding. I've always been frustrated with people who claim they're "deleting my account because of the amount of time I waste on here". Hello? Just stop spending so much time on it...
The only reason I can think of to delete your account would be if you actually wanted to mass-delete every note and posted item you'd posted, every post on your wall, and every tag that you'd ever been given. Otherwise, just disappear for a week or three. Your "friends" will forgive you, and the real ones might even call or e-mail if they're really that concerned about you falling off the face of the earth.
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I very much agree! I've wasted large amounts of time on several sites *cough*Slashdot*uncough* but when I have a lot of work (on workdays) or want to spend more time with my GF (on weekends), I have no problem walking away from Slashdot/Facebook/Twitter/etc until I run out of RL stuff to keep me busy.
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I don't know about Facebook. My experience with it had me feeling very isolated. Unlike myspace. Myspace got pretty demanding between the friends' blogs, bulletins, reciprocating the love they show you in your profile comments with a corresponding photo of goatse on their profile. I deleted my account, but admittedly, I was just finding it more tiresome in general.
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That twitter is down so much is pure schadenfreude. The most obnoxious, in your face, viral marketers and sock puppeteers on the net. I only wish them continued failure. Hopefully the inane fad will pass soon, and they'll go the way of every other insubstantial, "latest thing" website.
mod parent down (wrong) (Score:3, Informative)
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the person in the utility belt is supposed to be Gary Coleman.
Re:Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (Score:4, Funny)
Your post, however, was a great contribution to society and will be studied for years by future generations.
Re:Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I don't care so much about the downtime.
However, your post shows extreme shortsightedness to what the people of this world are interested in. Yeah, Facebook, Twitter and the like *can* be extreme wastes of time. But, there is a reason that so many people are drawn to those sites. As engineers and "nerds," it would be interesting to not only know why (psychology playing a huge role in this), but what can be done to leverage technologies like these to actually provide something "worthwhile." (I put worthwhile in quotes as the worth of something is very relative.)
What may or may not be important to you is not what the populace as a whole agrees with. You're definitely entitled to your own opinion (and I will agree with you to some extent), but given the number of users of these sites, it's important to consider the bigger picture and implications.
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I think there is some truth in that, but the reason why most people use these sites is peer pressure, purely and simply. It's just a fad for most people. It's just like a local bar or club becomes the in place to go to -- without any substance. Being the reason why there's a drift from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to the next thing.
Personally I can see absolutely n
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It could be that there are genuine core uses for ... Twitter ... though I cannot personally think of what they could be.
It's baby IRC for text-tards.
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Great? How?
If you really want to see a site geared towards artists, have a look at DeviantArt.
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Maybe not so much for painters/sketchers, but for other artists [webreference.com]?
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Granted, DevArt has gone way downhill (and it wasn't that high uphill to begin with), but let's be brutally honest - it's not often that Encyclopedia Dramatica gets it right without having to resort to exaggeration or hyperbole, but their article on SheezyArt [encycloped...matica.com] is scarily accurate.
It was built as a shameless ripoff of DevArt - numerous people diff'ed the HTML and CSS and found huge swathes blatantly stolen. Even now, it still is largely a carbon copy of DA.
It was built by furries who were pisse
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Maybe parent was referring primarily to "artists" in the musical sense.
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Parent was, indeed, the first person to post "First!" — for what that's worth.