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Twitter Not Rocket Science, but Still a Work in Progress
While it may not be rocket science, the Twitter team has been making a concerted effort to effect better communication with their community at large. Recently they were set-upon by a barrage of technical and related questions and the resulting answers are actually somewhat interesting. "Before we share our answers, it's important to note one very big piece of information: We are currently taking a new approach to the way Twitter functions technically with the help of a recently enhanced staff of amazing systems engineers formerly of Google, IBM, and other high-profile technology companies added to our core team. Our answers below refer to how Twitter has worked historically--we know it is not correct and we're changing that."
I wonder what they mean by "elegant filesystem-based approach"? Maybe their going to treat tweets like an email and store it all in the filesystem rather than a database? There's certainly some proven extremely high volume email servers so you know that method scales.
I wonder what the disadvantages of setting up a front end to an email system and covert incoming tweets to actual an actual email is. On the retrieval side you just read the mailbox and convert back to the tweet format then send them on to the destination.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Dude, I'm not seeing the hate here. May be an eye of the beholder kind of thing.
I do have two concerns about the service, apart from the supposed outages.
One is that they don't seem to have any plan that can make money on their service. I suppose they are trying to build up a service that they can sell to Microsoft, Yahoo or Google, but how much of the user base is going to tolerate ads if any of them bought it as a platform to serve ads?
Another is that they are very quick to cancel passwords due to inactivity, requiring a request to get it reset. I don't know if it's one week or one month, but it's as if they don't want you at all if you don't log in at least once a week. However often they do it, I've not seen any other service do it so quickly.
Someone already did this.
http://eric.themoritzfamily.com/2008/05/20/appengine-vs-twitter/
I haven't tried it tho.
fear is the mind killer
Plurk has been gaining popularity in the past 24 hours, and it's handling scalability rather well so far (after having been mentioned by Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, TechCrunch, and others). I'm very curious to see how well it would hold up if it had the same number of users as Twitter, though.
the JoshMeister on Security