Resistance is Futile, It’s FriendFeed FTW!

Yesterday, when the big Apple iPhone hoopla and hype sent floods of traffic to popular technology news web sites, blogs, and services, we all expected Twitter to go down in flames. They didn’t do so, a feat so downright unbelievable that Michael Arrington of TechCrunch even took time to congratulate them via a blog post on TC, saying:

Well, they made it, and I applaud them. To be fair, they did have some minor downtime (minor by Twitter standards) - 4% of requests failed. But it was close enough to call it win, and I hereby give them their due. Twitter failed to fail, and I am a happy user today.

Well, maybe you didn’t see the FAIL whale of death yesterday on our beloved, but struggling, service’s homepage, but to call this a success it a bit of stretch. That’s because Twitter’s uptime came at the expense of just about everything else.

As the Twitter Status blog documented, they began with temporarily disabling the “replies,” “everyone,” and “archive” tabs. Then they dropped the API request limit to a painfully slow 10 per hour and asked everyone to configure their clients to not pull more frequently than once every 6 minutes. For a huge online event like the iPhone 2.0 announcement, occurring in real-time no less, having to deal with Twhirl timeouts was simply unacceptable.

After the “Stevenote” was over, they slowly began restoring functionality to the site, tab by tab, but turning off other features along the way like “track via SMS.” The API limit was bumped up to 20 per hour. Then, of course, there was a network problem.

Now, granted, none of this came as a surprise – Twitter at least had the decency to warn us of their impending “gray mode,” which let them shed load quickly during this peak time…but quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered with them when there was iPhone news to be heard.

Instead, I followed the keynote in the VentureBeat WWDC Livestream FriendFeed room, where updates came fast and furious and no downtime was had. Now, sure, you could say that the FriendFeed service is more stable because it has fewer users, but I like to think that it’s because guys from Google know how to build things that scale.

It’s funny – when I describe Twitter to non-geeks, I often refer to it as sort of an “offline IM” – who knew how accurate that would be? For me at least, yesterday proved that when information matters, it’s FriendFeed for the win.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, I watched FriendFeed via my Firefox browser sidebar via the My Social 24×7 extension which is becoming my favorite way to track FriendFeed. If it had an auto-update feature, I would be complete.