Twitter is the queen of micro-down

My design for Twitter's "over capacity" screen
Originally uploaded by Mykl Roventine

Twitter has been so popular that it finally reached a stage where it was down more  and more frequently (Down is the new Black). But, after a total melt-down, they got their act together and sailed through Apple's WWDC without a hitch.

Or so they want us to think.

One of their clever solutions is to throttle down various features as things get heavy, features such as pagination, IM, mobile page.

I was wondering how that might work in practice, but now I know.

Instead of all of us suffering with a massive down time, the down time is spread across all of us, micro-down moments, one at a time. And because the micro-down time shows up once in a while to an individual (it goes away to micro-down someone else as you reload), _individual_ perceptions are improved.

So, the Queen of Micro-blogging is also the Queen of Micro-down.

At least this is what it feels like. Is this the case? Does anyone know?