I have been using Twitter lately and have really gotten into it. I mostly use it with SMS from my palm treo 700w and have enjoyed the few people I actually follow and find great value in listening to the twitter of these people. That being said, i have been really curious as to how this system is architected and since i work for a company that is creating a social network for sports among other things, i am fascinated on how to scale a social graph. The problem seems to be with messaging and more critical the friends feed. The scale and queries of finding what friends are up to can be a very tricky scalability problem. I became even more fascinated with this after reading this post: Scaling a Microblogging Service
Also it is refreshing to hear from that actual developers that are creating this system: http://dev.twitter.com/2008/05/youve-got-qs-weve-got-as.html
For any of us that have created a site that actually needs to worry about scale can respect what it feels like when there is slow response or down time from your site. It is fun and challenging, but sometimes is a thankless job. For those of you that thrive on the passion of making a real cool service, I commend you and want to give thanks for fixing things that are not so easy to fix, but make the biggest impact system wide. Those are usually the hardest to find.
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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
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