Why Twitter is Slowing Down the Internet.

With all the services and widgets tied around the hyped “micro blogging service” twitter we start to experience a strange phenomenon. A lot of websites are getting slower and slower just because webmasters present their latest “tweets” somewhere online. Take some very well known pages as an example: first Jason Kottke – no need for explanation – but since he integrates his twitterstream into his webpage his website loads significant slower compared to the pre-twitter times (UPDATE: please see comment #3 below  Jason is caching his twitterstream. I was wrong). Second: take evhead, the webpage of blogger/twitter founder Ev Williams. His twitter stream is presented on top of the page, but as soon as twitter slows down or even actually “is down” you will wait ages to get beyond the first line saying: “Twitter updates”. So maybe it is a good idea to include the twitter javascript at the very bottom of your page. Making your page load without waiting for the twitter server(s) to respond in time. Since I am not the only one discovering this problem (see Alex Iskold on “How JS is Slowing Down the Web”), there are some brilliant workaround out there, a very clever one by Remy Sharp.