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The Open Source Technology Behind Twitter
caseyb89 writes "If it weren't for open source technology, you wouldn't be able to tweet. Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager at Twitter, shares how open source is vital to Twitter's success. He states that using open source is a 'no-brainer' for Twitter because it 'allows us to customize and tweak code to meet our fast-paced engineering needs as our service and community grows.' Twitter also established an open source office about a year ago to support a variety of open source organizations that are important to them. Aniszczyk will discuss Twitters open source usage in his keynote at LinuxCon."
Much like Google, Twitter embraces open source when it benefits them, even as they are in the process of locking down their API and making the service more "closed." It says a lot about open source that tech companies are finding so much benefit in embracing it as PART of their strategy, but the Twitter platform itself will never be completely open source, because Twitter knows it benefits them to keep it closed.
Yeah, but now 140 characters is part of twitter's culture and identity. The fact that the SMS limit doesn't exist anymore doesn't matter one iota.
What is twitter without banally short attention spans?
If Twitter was really based on an open source model, they would have fixed that 160 character limit a long time ago; It's a relic of a bygone era.
The identica people can't seem to decide on a limit.
http://status.net/2010/02/15/identi-ca-character-limit-results
http://status.net/wiki/Identica/web
This is very much like the desktop publishing situation in the 80s... people whining that they can't express themselves without using 45 different fonts and 5 colors on a page... Newsflash is they can't express themselves... at all... a tech feature isn't going to fix that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Anything of widespread use is going to acquire idiot users. With that said, Twitter is far more useful and worthwhile than most "social" platforms out there. I put "social" in quotes because you could just as easily follow a couple of information sites or key developers on a project and your twitter becomes a centralized news feed rather than people talking about the latest annoyance on their way to work.
I was skeptical of it at first too but it's surprisingly useful if you follow the right people.
Having to write all of that software themselves may have set the barrier to entry too high for them to ever get started. Even a small increase in start up cost can be the difference between a product or service launching or never even being attempted.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I was skeptical of it at first too but it's surprisingly useful if you follow the right people.
For a lot of people twitter is what rss was supposed to be. Except that RSS does a better job of it than twitter does.
I really don't get twitter... all the real use cases people like are much better served by RSS.
Isn't the 160 character limit a limitation of the SMS protocol, and not Twitter?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If it weren't for open source technology, you wouldn't be able to tweet.
The article sounds like an astroturf for Microsoft.
Calling someone a name is not sarcasm.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
twitter is far more than a "read-only" RSS: RT, Reply/DM - and it is easy to use for non-techies...
Some differences vs. RSS:
- Enforced limit on tweet size
- Text only (so worked with even simple phones via text message)
- I'm not sure I could figure out, in a short time, how to set up an RSS feed that can be updated via SMS.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Why is the entire Internet against me?" wondered Sarcasm Nazi Racist, Jr.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Per usual what is "popular" is typically not the best technology available. Look at game consoles: Atari 2600, NES, PS1, PS2, Wii were not the most powerful consoles of their generation but they still obliterated the rest.
Super Audio CD and DVD-audio were both superior to the MP3s and AACs, but sold poorly. And now we have twitter which you claim is inferior to RSS, but that doesn't really matter to the general populace.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Stop bringing facts into this discussion, it disrupts our goal of replacing all modern technology with a combination of 1990s protocols such as Usenet and IRC.
You've never met the electronic mail man? It's called email for a reason.
fair enough. and good point. But the use cases where people cite "twitter is really useful" tends to be to follow a particular news feed.
retweeting is rarely more than just noise, unless the rt is through an aggregator account... but then its really being used as news feed by its followers and the rt functionality isn't much more than a couple seconds of copy/paste with any RSS feed/aggregator.
As soon as "normal users" start retweeting; its usually just worthless noise.
reply/dm -- true enough that they are features not in RSS. But again, replies tend to be more noise than news, and DM -is little more than than what sms/email already does.