Twitter’s ups and downs are now almost legendary. There’s now a web site which can tell you if it’s up or not.

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?