Twitter Abuse

I always thought that "Twitter abuse" was when you refused to answer calls on your mobile phone because you were too busy tweeting. But Biz Stone apparently meant something different when he wrote this:

Over the weekend we made a bunch of bug fixes and improvements to Twitter which resulted in more reliability in message delivery—this increased overall traffic.

Ordinarily, increased reliability and traffic is a good thing. However, this comprehensive delivery of messages together with two severe cases of abuse strained Twitter's primary database enough to degrade performance.

I mused about this on Tuesday evening:

hmm...read post from @biz. "two severe cases of abuse"? not sure if i can figure out how to "abuse" twitter, but i guess it's possible.

I received this reply:

@oemperor: Such is my Catholic guilt and self-absorption that I immediately wondered if I was one of the two.

For the record, the person who tweeted that has made 4,958 Twitter updates.

At last count, I have made 5,193.

So who's the abuser here?

P.S. For more on Biz's "abuse" comment, see You Are Killing Me.

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