The sentiment so far is more frustration with a favorite tool than a desire to find a new one. Twitter: Victim of own success?

Twitter is so two seconds ago.

The hot social network has become so huge that it chalked up 10.3 million debate-related tweets in 90 minutes Wednesday night. That’s 1,907 TPS, or tweets per second — faster than the human eye can read.


All that noise had some of Twitter’s biggest users complaining or even hopping off for the show, leaving a sour taste in some mouths on a banner night for the company. And Twitter knows it.

If the experience changes permanently — from a lively conversation to a yelling match — Twitter could lose some of its cachet with the smart set.

But, so far the sentiment is more frustration with a favorite tool rather than a desire to find a new one.

Company officials say their biggest product-development challenge is reducing the “signal to noise ratio” for users. That means making sure users get what they want from the Twitterverse without being overloaded with junk Tweets.

“We continue to experiment with how to surface the most relevant tweets to users during large events like the debates,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz. She noted that the overload issue isn’t much of a problem for average users, who “weren’t quite as overwhelmed and they probably really enjoyed seeing what folks ... had to say in real time.”

They’ve also been experimenting with events pages, which were used for NASCAR races, the London Olympics, the political conventions and last night’s presidential debate. The algorithms are complex, but the concept is simple. Twitter picks a list of relevant users on a topic — say, political journalists, commentators and campaign officials for a debate — and populates the page with Tweets from their accounts. The system is set up to start capturing popular themes that arise spontaneously during the debate from accounts that weren’t originally on the list. It’s in this way that Twitter hopes to provide a better experience for users who want to follow a major national or world event without having to sort through their feeds for relevant insights.

Indeed, many Twitter users seemed to enjoy all the talk about the debate, and some tweeted that they watched their feeds rather than the television to keep up with what the candidates, the surrogates and their own friends had to say about each zinger and facial expression. While the political class fretted about the overload, the typical user doesn’t follow everyone who has ever run for office, written a national political story or worked on a campaign.

“#debate boring. Listening to debate while reading Twitter feed awesome,” wrote @andymatkovich, who follows 224 people.

Twitter uses big events like the presidential debate to expand its network, allowing folks to see tweets without having already registered with the site, as @realstrangerec pointed out in signing up on Wednesday night. “Joining #twitter because the tweets on the #debate! Awesome stuff!!” he wrote.

The service is starting to supplant the post-debate spin room as a gauge of how the candidates are doing. Tweets from liberals criticizing moderator Jim Lehrer’s performance were a sure sign that their guy, President Barack Obama, wasn’t winning the night. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, got early kudos from Republicans and many political analysts. It was possible for just about anyone — even #BigBird — to watch the ebb and flow of the event just by keeping an eye on their Twitter feed. For some users, it got to be too much.

“I just added the #debate feed and it’s moving WAY too fast for me,” @sammydavis22 tweeted Wednesday night. “Oh dear.”

Ditto for @drgrist: “My twitter feed is almost too fast for me to follow, already, 45 minutes before the debate. This is going to make my head hurt.”

That kind of talk crops up from time to time, says Lance Ulanoff of the social media news site Mashable.

“This feeling of Twitter not being up to the task occasionally happens during these high-impact events. It’s frustrating and high-profile users will often vent their frustration,” he said. “Still, most Twitter users are neither advanced nor high-profile and probably don’t even notice the slowdown. The advanced users notice and complain, but are too devoted to the platform to leave.”

Plus, it could be worse. Twitter reports that 40 percent of its 140 million members never Tweet at all.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 7:10 p.m. on October 4, 2012.