Does Twitter miss former architect Blaine Cook, the technician who was simultaneously blamed for the site's outages and hailed for keeping it alive? We're guessing so, if only because Cook's long-haired mug still — still! — gazes from Twitter's jobs page. Cook recently took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator. He was chummy enough with his coworkers to show up at a going-away party for departing Brickhouse chief Chad Dickerson. But Cook is apparently a short-timer there. A source reports Cook saying he couldn't wait for his contract to expire so he can leave around the end of next month. That's a brief stint, even for Yahoo.

Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect led to its frequent outages. We'd heard he left Twitter with plans to relocate to the U.K. Instead, we've learned, he took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse, the troubled San Francisco office meant to incubate new projects. He's believed to be working for Chad Dickerson, who recently listed a position for a software engineer experienced in the Ruby programming language — one of Cook's specialties.

Twitter has bought Summize, a search engine which indexes Twitter messages. It's hard to imagine Summize going anywhere else. But this deal is not about "strategic fit" or any such nonsense. No, it's about how the cleverly lazy founders of Twitter have found a way around the biggest management headache of all: Hiring employees. Twitter's substantial downtime, and a subsequent blame game about whether former architect Blaine Cook was at fault, shows how often technological problems come down to people. We actually don't think Cook made bad technical decisions — but it's now pretty clear that he was more interested in moving on than staying at Twitter and arguing with founder Ev Williams about how to fix the site. At $15 million, Summize might actually be a cheaper solution than trying to hire a conventional replacement for Cook.

Briton Paul S. Downey catches Blaine Cook, former lead architect of Twitter, at Supernova. Can you suggest a better headline? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Damn, forgot this job came with a side of Scoble." by actionhero11. (Photo by Phil Whitehouse)

Since leaving Twitter, former chief architect Blaine Cook has been sparring with his former employers over the cause of Twitter's outages. It's a peculiar battle of words, with Cook never mentioning Twitter and Twitter never mentioning Cook. But perhaps things aren't that unfriendly. According to Twitter, Cook (second from top and from right) is one of the reasons people should come work for Twitter.

Twitter's founders are waging a behind-the-scenes war with Blaine Cook, the blogging service's former chief architect. The subject: Who's responsible for the service's perpetual outages. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington ran a series of leading questions about Twitter's infrastructure, attributing them to "people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture." I don't think that's true, if only because I received a similar set of questions, before Arrington's post went up, from a source who identified himself as a "friend of Blaine." In their official response, Twitter cofounders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone — they're the two one always forgets about, because they're not as interesting as Evan Williams — go out of their way to avoid naming names.

Blaine Cook, Twitter's former chief architect, has a lot of time on his hands of late — and he's using it to complain about Twitter. On Twitter. His latest gripe: That his former colleagues are taking too long to restore a service that lets users submit updates via instant messenger. "It's not a difficult service to restore," harrumphs Cook. How much better if Cook had designed the system not to go down before he left, no?

Before he left, former Twitter architect Blaine Cook's job was to assure the service's scalability," or the ability to expand to meet growing user demand. Didn't happen. Instead, Twitter leads all social networks in downtime so far this year. In a post to his blog today, Cook wants to make one thing very clear: He knows what scalability is, OK? If one eliminates database chokepoints and throws enough servers at the problem, even crappy code written in Ruby on Rails will work. Cook just couldn't make it happen for Twitter. Here's the 100-word version:

When Twitter hired Lee Mighdoll as VP of engineering and operations in January, cofounder Biz Stone called him the "perfect match" for the company. Not anymore. Mighdoll is out after just three months of the job. "The match was not perfect," Stone told SAI in an email. Mighdoll is the second engineer reported to have left Twitter in the last two days; architect Blaine Cook fled the country yesterday. Neither was able to fix Twitter's oft-reported propensity to crash. We hear the final straw to break Biz Stone's back was not the breakdown yesterday that TechCrunch described as a "privacy disaster". Makes sense, because isn't that Twitter's raison d'être?

Lead architect Blaine Cook helped build Twitter into the downtime-prone morass it is today. Now, as the service grows ever more popular, and ever more unreliable, he's out. In an email to Silicon Alley Insider, Cook says he left Twitter over two weeks ago and plans to move to the U.K. with his partner. "We're Canadian and her visa makes it impossible for her to work in the U.S.," Cook explains. SAI's Peter Kafka wonders if Cook actually got the boot due to Twitter's many outages. We think it's more likely that, as close to Twitter's groundswell as he is, Cook has seen what Twitter hath wrought and is wisely fleeing the country before Robert Scoble tests the limits of how many Twitters one human — or other creature — can send in a day.