(insert heavy sigh of relief)

Wow, what a day.

I quietly launched TweetByMail a couple days ago. I poked around Twitter looking for people in the same boat as me… Canadians who were missing the SMS updates. I sent a few personal invitations, posted the link in a couple places. I was looking for a small handful of keen testers.

However, in the early evening, there’s a distant rumble. Turns out, the CEO of Twitter caught wind of the project and mentioned it to his followers. All 33,342 of them. That was pretty nice of him to do. Mostly, it shows that the recent loss of SMS updates for Canadians and international users is something that bothers them, and they are happy to suggest solutions in the meantime.

Anyhoo, that mention shot off like a rocket, getting re-tweeted all over the place. The response was overwhelming. Overwhelming as in totally cool and I never was expecting so much attention… but also overwhelming as in literally overwhelming. The server crashed. (Arrrrrgh!)

I’ve since discovered the problem, though, and fixed it so it won’t happen again. Have you ever been to a wedding, where the drunk uncle takes the microphone and wanders right in front of the speaker, causing a horrendous loud noise? Yup, feedback. And endless loop that gets worse as it goes. Well, that’s what brought down TweetByMail today. No, not a drunken uncle. Feedback of the digital sort. Due to a mis-configured email filter (gee, who did that?) messages were bouncing around inside like fleas on a frying pan.

Wow, what a day.

Despite all that, I did manage to add some cool updates. New commands for gagging and throttling. (sounds violent when you say it like that) Just now I finished the first step to processing rich text messages. It’s been a great day. Plenty of new people using the service. (I hope those that had a rough go with the crashing will come back again!)

Oh, and even with the service still throttled down, we just passed 1000 outgoing tweets!

Thank you, folks!

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