Twitter's weakening pulse - The scalability "Penalty"

I just came across an interesting article by Dan Ferber: Twitter's Weakening Pulse, which talks about how Twitter is starting to lose its users due to endless scalability and reliability issues:

The Twitter concept has been cloned (Pownce and Plurk), and it won't be long before Facebook, MySpace, or other big players figure out how to make following, followers, tracking, and summizing part of their service

A few weeks ago I published a post that discusses measuring the cost of scaling. Beyond the cost of hardware and software, I also pointed out a cost that is much more difficult to measure, but probably has the biggest impact on the business:

Indirect costs, resulting from the unpredictability of our system and the inflexibility that it imposes on our business, can have huge implications to the business, well beyond any measurable criteria. Even if your company can measure the direct losses from downtime due to lost sales or trades, you'll be hard-pressed to measure damaged reputation, loss of customer trust, and in some cases, the loss of your job...

It would be a false assumption that the company controls the situation, and has time to plan everything in advance. What if Mylie Cyrus shows up on the cover of Seventeen holding the super-cool gizmo the company sells and now all of a sudden there's a mad rush to buy it on the site? We need to assume that we can't predict the load. It doesn't happen when we plan for it. It can happen when we least expect it.

With social networks or electronic trading and e-commerce, such events can quickly lead to a viral effect or what's also known as an 'event storm'. Such a chain of events can quickly lead to disaster, such as a site crash, and the company is now all over the news and the blogosphere (and not in a good way), customers are frustrated and many defect to the competition. The trouble is that they can't fix it in a snap. Remember: they need a few months heads up to re-write the application.

According to a Forrester survey, the cost of one hour of downtime can easily be between $10k to $1 million -- and that doesn't include intangibles such as reputation damage.What i found even more interesting is 25% of companies that participated in that survey couldn't even estimate the cost of downtime.

If we want to be successful we can't afford making scalability an afterthought. The days in which the likes of Amazon, Google and eBay had the luxury of re-writing their applications every few months to meet scalability needs are gone. Customers have many alternatives, and they are not going to patiently wait for a company to go through a lengthy re-write process, but will simply switch to another service.