For twitter.com users, the near perfect depiction of the series of poor architecture choices leading to the current state of affairs shows twitters (birds) airlifting a seemingly blissful whale by threads over the sea. Aside from the fallacy of bliss in losing access to one's tribe, no image could be more apropos for indicating that twitter is down. Twitter is over capacity in so many ways.

I've been thinking and writing code in the personal connectivity space for a decade or more. I even have a patent in the peer presence space. I joined a freaky little start-up that Intel Corporation invested in called The Palace. Time Warner and SoftBank were in that mix, too. In the late 1990s, we had high hopes of turning our vision of inter-personal connectedness into a cash cow. There were distance learning angles, entertainment angles, etc. All painfully 1990s thinking in retrospect.

We made so many mistakes. However, the technology wasn't the real problem. It was our thinking that was specious. Even as our pens stroked out the patents on paper and our keyboards tapped those ideas into great code, we couldn't imagine the power of the tribe that services like twitter.com evoke in the average user. Our Palace code was built very much like twitter. Centralized message dispatch. It did OK at intranet scale but when it came to thousands or millions of users, it was just the wrong way to build the thing.

Success can be a powerful enemy. Hubris, it seems, is a much greater threat to any technology-oriented business. The scale of the Internet guarantees that. As Andy Grove taught me, Only the Paranoid Survive. Paranoia, like hubris, is an equally self-interested set of emotions. But paranoia is sigularly devoid of vanity. And vanity distracts us from truthful ideas like, "It's probably not smart to build a hub-and-spoke protocol for something that has to scale to millions of users."

I agree with Scott Hanselman that microblogging should not be centralized. Except for SMS and directory access, there's just no reason to make any other parts of a system like that centralized.