Thanks to Oprah, Amazon is offering a special discount of $50 on the price of Kindle which can be availed by entering the promotional code “OPRAHWINFREY” in the checkout pipeline on Amazon.com (The offer is valid through Nov 1, 2008).

Oprah praised and proclaimed Kindle through her quoted words- “new favorite gadget”, “life changing”, “the wave of the future” and “most amazing thing” on her show.

Kindle is an electronic reading device that is capable of storing more than 190,000 books, magazines, blogs and newspapers. It allows free of charge wireless access of the same at just the hit of a button. The wireless access uses Whispernet technology to provide anytime-anywhere wireless search, download, and read facility to its users. And the biggest relief for all is that you do not have to take any service plan or pay monthly wireless bills.

The Kindle costs $359 which is $59 more than the current model of Sony Reader PRS-505 ($300) but is $41 less than Sony Reader’s upcoming touchscreen PRS-700 model ($400).

Amazon had their problems this past week, but what about Twitter?

I am a Twitter user, but lately or more like consistently, the site has issues with its availability. One day it’s up than it’s down! It’s having an affect on many of us that use Twitter to communicate with friends, family, and co–workers. Also, if you’re using the Twitter sidebar on your web site, it will affect your sites load time as it’s calling a source that is unavailable.

Twitter followers are beginning to lose trust. I believe Twitter is trying the patience of its users. Every time Twitter users go to Twitter.com or to their Twitter app and they see the “Fail Whale,” an error message, or just a non-responsive site, they’re that much less likely to come back the next time.

Twitter needs improve their service availability or it will fail, and become a black-hole in the internet. I think they need to shut it down and re-design, build scalability and re-launch the site.

What are your thoughts about Twitter? Are you frustrated?

Amazon.com’s Web site was down in North America for about two hours in the middle of the day Friday because of system problems, the online retailer said.

A little after 10 a.m. PDT, the company’s retail Web site shut down, giving an error code to anyone visiting it, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that measures Web site performance.

I find it amazing that a site such as this retail giant could even go off the air. Amazon is a cash cow, and that would make me think that its infrastructure has more redundancy than rice in China. How can such a popular site go off the air for such a long time (2 hours)?

Amazon.com Inc. spokesman Craig Berman said in a brief e-mail statement. “We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible.”

Well, two hours is not minimizing disruption or bring the site back online quickly! Mr. Berman your a business that’s well known, and your customers expect availability 100% of the time. Stop with the “we work to minimize any disruption”. What you should say is that “we guarantee 100% uptime”.

I wonder how many sales were lost during this two hour outage?