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Q&A: Long Before There Was Twitter, There Was AOL

April 28, 2008
by Charles Cooper
Executive Editor of Commentary, CNET News.com

Charles Cooper

When Twitter suffered a brownout last weekend, the “twitterati” had a collective conniption. I suppose the good news for co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone is that the bad news kicked up such a storm.

Lots of people are so addicted to Twitter that the intermittent problems wreaked havoc with their daily routine.

Lead architect Blaine Cook and VP of engineering and operations Lee Mighdoll are now gone. And it’s up to management to come up with a plan. But this isn’t the first time a popular online communication service found itself a target of criticism. In August 1996, America Online got in even bigger trouble after going dark for 19 hours.

How big a deal was it? Consider this: AOL’s outage was the lead news item on the evening news programs for ABC, NBC and CBS. If you thought the grumbling about Twitter was bad, remember that AOL back then had more than 5 million subscribers and they were not a happy lot.

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