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By Mel Duvall
The recent denial of service attacks on Twitter, which brought the popular social networking site to crawl on several occasions, taught the company a tough lesson, says co-founder Biz Stone.
In an interview on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS, Stone said the attacks are a sign of Twitter's increasing popularity and are something the company needs to learn how to deal with.
"What we learned from this is you have to tune your system to be able to handle this level of assault - this scale of assault," Stone said. "We spent a lot of 2008 sort of catching up with the popularity of Twitter . . . then along comes this massive attack."
Twitter was first crippled a week ago when it came under a well-coordinated denial-of-service attack. While Twitter was able to bring its service up after several hours, the availability of the site has continued to suffer from ongoing attacks.
Stone said the company has been working behind the scenes with outside experts, including "the folks at Google" to try to combat the attacks. But he acknowledged denial-of-service or DoS attacks can't really be stopped. Instead, he says, "you learn how to deal with it."
The Smiley interview provided several other interesting insights into Stone and the popularity of Twitter. Stone noted that his real name is Christopher Isaac Stone and that he got the moniker "Biz" because when he was a young child he had difficulty saying "Christopher" and would instead say "Bizerbur." The nickname Biz stuck.
Stone also told Smiley that for now he isn't worried about Twitter earning a profit. Instead he wants to focus on adding features to the service, but acknowledged the service has to start generating revenue. He says Twitter will remain a free service, but the company is exploring ways to generate revenue through an additional layer of services, such as analytics or corporate certification. The idea would be to assure users, for example, that a corporation such as Jet Blue is who they say they are and not someone pretending to spoof the airline.
A portion of the interview can be viewed here.
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