The much-discussed distributed denial of service attacks over the last two days which hobbled Twitter and also impacted a number of other sites, including Facebook and LiveJournal, has also had a tremendous negative impact downstream, bringing many third party applications and services to a halt. With the sluggishness and non-responsiveness stretching into what will be the third calendar day tomorrow, Twitter told developers, heading into the weekend, that not only was the attack ongoing, and not lessening, but they had no ETA for anything to get better.

While many developers are understandably sympathetic toward Twitter's troubles, even as the popular microblogging service's network architecture is being analyzed for weaknesses, the strain many of them were feeling without receiving answers started to be on display this evening as hours went on without an update - while at the same time, key Twitter employees happily updated that they were going out for sushi or enjoying tonight's Underworld concert.

One developer, in the company's Google Groups forums, wrote:

"There's been lots of posts from Twitter saying they plan for better communication. Okay, cool. But it's Friday night and I am pulling my hair out with no new information. I am sure they are doing all they can... but many third-party apps have been broken for 2 days now. And just as Twitter is getting bombarded with emails from developers... developers, too, are getting bombarded with complaints/questions from customers."

After the same developer noted that employees had gone out to catch dinner, he exclaimed frustratedly, "While food is important, would be helpful to also update devs what's going on, too, before a night on the town?!?!?!" This led to another developer's stating he too agreed with the outrage, adding:

"Thanks for your outrage. I thought i was one of the only few that have issues with how things are being handled."

But shortly after the conversation threatened to get ugly, Twitter's Chad Etzel posted an update, around 8 p.m. Pacific time, catching up the community, and he didn't have much good news.

His major points:

• "The DDoS attack is still ongoing"
• "the intensity has not decreased at all"
• "interaction with the site and with the API will continue to be shaky"
• *There is no ETA on fixing any of this* (repeated twice)

He told developers that the situation at Twitter will "continue to be rocky" and may actually get worse, but also said that the company's operations team will be working "around the clock" this weekend, adding, "as much as you want it to be fixed, we want it to be fixed more."

With past outages, Twitter has had a mixed bag in terms of communicating to the developer community. Had the initial complaints gone unanswered, it's likely Twitter would have transitioned further away from being the victim to being seen as part of the problem. Yes, applications are broken. Yes, access is still slow, and as the site has become a major piece of infrastructure in today's social Web, its downtime is more than trivial. But this isn't a situation of the company's employees partying on a sinking ship. It sounds like the team is strained, and being realistic about what will continue to be a long process of restoring normality.

Lunch 2.0 with Kosmix, Mozilla and FriendFeed

As mentioned yesterday, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel featuring representatives from three forward-looking Web companies looking to push change and compete with established market leaders. You can watch the full hour-plus long video recording on UStream, or catch five minutes of highlights above. It was a pleasure to participate, as it was my first time moderating, and I hope I get the chance to do so again. Thanks to the 200 plus people who attended, the panelists, and for Kosmix, putting it together.

Around 12:30 p.m. this afternoon, I will be sitting down with Anand Rajaraman, Co-Founder of Kosmix, Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of Friendfeed and Chris Beard, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer to talk about how these three small companies are driving change online. If you can't be one of the more than 150 expected to attend in person today, I hope you will get a chance to follow along on the live Ustream coverage.

To join us, start here around noon: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lunch-2-0-with-kosmix-mozilla-and-friendfeed

More information on the panel was included in my post: Join Mozilla, FriendFeed and Kosmix for Lunch 2.0 on August 6th

Disclosure: Kosmix.com is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am General Manager of New Media.

For weeks, in my ever-increasing list of potential future blog post topics, I have had one titled, "What If I Purged My Twitter Followers?". Trust me, the option has crossed my mind on the rare occasion I log in and try to use Twitter or any of its 3rd party apps in the way the Twitter team had intended - as I watch update after inane update swim in a sea of half-baked offers and hashtaggery. But even as I see some notable folks talking about taking apart their list of connections with the subtlety of Jack Nicholson wielding an axe in The Shining, I'm still ignoring the temptation to join them. While I may weed out some clear spammers now and again, I think to massively prune my list would introduce more problems, real and emotional, than it would present solutions.

Since I started using Twitter in early 2008, I have somehow amassed more than 12,000 connections. Thanks to my employing an auto-follow capability from SocialToo, a company run by Jesse Stay who I advise, those who add me as a connection in Twitter gain a reciprocal move almost instantaneously, without my lifting a finger. While some may think this is "disingenuous", doing so saves me the time of reviewing each new follower one by one to gauge "worthiness", and it also enables them to send me direct messages - as Twitter will block the capability otherwise.


Scoble's Unfollowing Is Easily Seen Via TwitterCounter
I recognize there are problems with spammers on Twitter. I get my fair share of automated direct messages. I see ridiculous accounts that look more like robots than people. But if I set an artificial standard that required me to have a personal relationship with an individual in order to follow them on Twitter or any network, I would be selling myself short in terms of getting to potentially know the person, and I would be selling them short by not giving them a chance when it is likely they just wanted to be connected in an environment where they were comfortable.

Assuming I were to abstain from using an auto-unfollow service (SocialToo does this also), and I took 10 seconds to review each of the 12,000 accounts, it would take more than 33 hours to adequately cleanse my feed. And I know if I did use an unfollowing service, a lot of great people would be thrown out with the bathwater. I saw Scoble's experiment, only to have it impact friends of mine like Drew Olanoff and Kent Newsome, who are both real humans who contribute on Twitter and other networks. I know, without question, that there are many future peers on the Web that I just haven't had the luck to meet yet.

Benjamin Franklin, once paraphrasing Blackstone's formulation, said, "It is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." So too do I see it better that 100 spammers fill my feed than I lose access to the innocents who remain. I am not so self-centered as to believe I know the full set of people who I can learn from and derive value. So don't look for me to start shaking my numbers down on any of the networks - even if it is getting more popular.

Also see: Twitter is for Following Topics and Listening, Not for Following People from February 26th for more background on this.