The only thing Twitter has been consistent about is its failure to scale and develop a stable platform given its growth and all the hype about the service. How can Twitter not be able to handle search after 3 years in operation and $155 million in funding?

Yes Twitter helps people reach out to millions, get links across and it is being regarded as a pseudo-utility but in the absence of a stable infrastructure Twitter is a disaster waiting to happen. It is a bit like building on top of a fault line, in this case a fault line supporting in excess of 50 million users. Its all good till that big one hits and Twitter experiences the ultimate fail whale.

I’m tempted to say I am not against Twitter but I am increasingly disturbed by an apparent failure or inability to build a stable platform for this service. There are still regular outages (is that a feature and not a bug?) and basic features are still not working. What is going on here? How many times have you seen Facebook go down in recent years?

Its rewarding using Twitter and building your Twitter network but make sure you have a backup of not only your Twitter stream (there are a couple ways to do this – subscribe to the RSS feed or use a service like Backupify to backup your Twitter account). If Twitter does actually experience a major outage there are going to be a lot of people suddenly finding themselves in virtual silence, disconnected from what were previously regarded as invaluable communities.