Twitter...hum

For the last few weeks I've been using twitter to update my Facebook status. For those who don't know what twitter is asks the simple questions: what are you doing? then allowing you only 140 characters to reply! The ui is simple, a text box and an update button.

Twitter has been described as  Micro blogging  using the discipline of the small message size found in SMS combined with the user interactivity of IM. What's clever is that twitter allows you to follow other users (or twitters) feeds. This creates a dynamic community of short posts, with the twitters you follow updating their feeds in almost real time. You can pose questions to your followers and post directly to other users.

A community of sites has built up as an eco system of complentary sites.  Twitter hasn't yet really taken of on this side of the Atlantic compared to the US, where some of the Web 2.0 hero's can claim upwards of 20000 followers. I currently have 10 followers and follow 20 or so. I've struggled to convince friends to take it up but I'm sure in a few months it will be the 'site de jour'.

One of the challenges with technologies such as Twitter is the ability to build an application that unexpectedly capture the moment and have to scale to massive volumes. Twitter uses the LAMP technology stack so the db layer is MYSQL which is being see very heavy db writes to support the application. I'm not sure that currently MSSQL has the answers for providing this sort of scalability and responsiveness. Oracle has Times Ten (in memory single process space) or Coherence (multi process scalability). Although some users have 20000 followers the big challenge will be when a major celeb like a Paris Hilton starts using Twitter and draws in hundred's of thousands of followers.

Kevin Rose said that Digg.com was built originally to support 100k hits per month - currently they have had to scale the web site to manage  25 million unique hits per month. That means that all the original code has been replaced, at the same time limiting the length of time the site is unavailable as the upgrades are slipped in. Infrastructure technologies such as 'grid' and services such as Amazon S3 mean that Web 2.0 start ups do not need put all their startup capital into datacentres and infrastructure, but the underlying architecture and software design still has to take this into account. One of the major reasons for the failure of .com fashion retailer Boo.com, was the need to procure and build an infrastructure that had to support hugely optimistic visitor and sales numbers predicted in the initial business case from day one, yet were starting their business from scratch with much lower numbers visitor numbers.

If Twitter allowed controlled or limited access communities  (like Facebook's networks functionality) the technology could be great in the workplace, but as its currently configured it is not possible to publish sensitive questions to colleagues only which is a major drawback.

My twitter page can be accessed by following the link. Please create an account and join the fun.