Twitter Props (Or: Yay! No Whales!)

I know I'm not the first to say it, but I wanted to give public props to Twitter for staying up during the Apple madness today. (For most of us.) It's not fair to just write about it when they're down, although with any luck the uptime will cease to become newsworthy soon! Considering the greater complexity of keeping Twitter up and running (as explained beautifully by TechCrunch here...although no clue if that's really accurate. Comments?) and how many other blogs and sites crashed today amid the 3G iPhone unveiling, I think we can say they've made a lot of improvements very fast. They've certainly improved their communications. And am I alone in smiling at that adorable whale even when he's delivering bad news?

With any luck, I may be able to add my Twitter badge back to my blog soon.

Meanwhile, in bizarro land: a post by Rafe Needleman here. Odd since on most people's browsers Twitter was up throughout the keynote, and Summize was down. Twitter deserves harsh press for its scalability problems, but I'm sick of everyone touting other competing services as up all the time. Plurk has had a small fraction of Twitter's traffic and crashed all ready, Summize barely made it through today, and Twirl and Twitterific seem to have constant problems. Can we just accept that maybe this is a hard engineering feat? Twitter has only recently started having systemic problems. At some point, aren't we all like that morbidly obese guy who's at a baseball game shoveling nachos while he berates a hitter because he can't hit a home run?