There’s a lot of people who are unhappy about the current situation at Twitter. Twitter has said that the reason for their downtime is that their super users with thousands of followers are the ones to blame because of the load they cause of Twitter servers every time they post.

So who’s to blame? Twitter for not properly setting up the site’s architecture or the super users who are using Twitter to promote themselves and their brands — for free.

The Two Sided Coin

Though Twitter never intended for their site to be used as a over hyped marketing machine, they should have at least setup limitations in what users can do (limit number of followers, messages per day, services used, etc.). On that note, people who are (ab)using a free service to ultimately make money should be kicking back some of that money back to Twitter.

Example: Robert Scoble relies heavily on his name (his brand) to market his thoughts, and to promote FastCompany, and his blog (which runs ads). He has over 20,000 followers on Twitter, and posts constantly on Twitter — effectively “clogging the tubes.”

Yet Another Example: Every single blog that submits to Twitter every time they post a new post. There have to be hundreds of blogs, with hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. The blogs are using Twitter as a very heavy lifting marketing tool. How much would the same tool cost 3 years ago?

I’m not saying I have the final answer, but do think a premium service is needed for Twitter. This will help Twitter bring in some well needed revenue in order to hire more rockstar engineers to fix the scale issues that the big players are causing.

Follow me on Twitter: @ryanmerket (but I promise if I get too many followers, I will start paying for it)