Scripting News - Latest Comments in State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

amsall — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:09:25 -0000

I'm surprised (shocked?) there's no mention of Plurk on this page, not even in the comments!

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

tigertwo — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:58:01 -0000

In the social media world, the same evolutionary rules of the survival of the fittest apply. If Twitter can't evolve to keep up with the demand then it will naturally fall by the wayside and be replaced. But then, that's what makes the whole thing so exciting.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Jane Diane Mercer — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:03:20 -0000

Do you happen to have a spare beta code for ping.fm, that looks like something I've been wanting for a while!

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

jr — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:25:29 -0000

Twitters main problem right now is dealing with Spam...or you can call it spewage from spewers. The guys from TechCrunch, Scoble and a few others are basically spammers. Using Twitter to send out constant free e-marketing for their blogs and other commentary. Getting an update from TC or Scoble ranks right there with the Viagara emails. I quickly unsubscribed to their feeds. Think about all of the unmonitored/un-used accounts that subscribed to these guys (bet there are 10s or 100s of thousands) that are taking up system cycles to get the drivel these guys send out.

Ironically, the spewers that are killing the system are also the ones that are bitching the loudest. How dare you take away our free emarketing/spam tool.

At some point Twitter is going to need to block the spewers. The big traffic guys will be up in arms (for a few minutes) and then move on to other networks. Twitter will be left with a system that can then run and provide service to the millions of other users that benefit from a short communication service.

Finally. Not sure why Twitter would say you couldn't decentralize this system. Makes them sound foolish. Maybe they meant you can't decentralize the way they've built Twitter...which is probably true.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

fdsa — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:16:14 -0000

Is there evidence of this?

If this were the case, then perhaps Twitter would have SMS features "rest" and show, that in fact, they can get the rest of the app and architecture right.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

fdsa — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:13:01 -0000

There have been discussions in Scripting News comments on what Twitter is and how Twitter is different things to different people. There are many uses and many cases.

I'm not discounting that you're onto something for some particular use cases of Twitter, but what you describe probably does not cover how Twitter is used for many people.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

TomCarroll — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:55:26 -0000

As I think about it Google Reader is close to twitter it needs an ability to comment directly, support SMS, publish a summary of followers and support authenticated posts and comments. A blog owner would have to have a unified RSS feed including comments, support for authenticated comments, create feed for directs for each follower.

Ok, I'm not going to map it all out but Google Reader + the application of some additional features + some blog enhancements would cover most of twitter's features.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

James — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:22:14 -0000

So people seem to have completely written off Twitter's ability to grow to meet demand, and perhaps with good reason: despite trying long and hard, they haven't managed it yet.

All I ask is that before flushing, we really get to the bottom of why a centralised architecture might not work. I am friends with people intimately familiar with the problem, and they all say the main stumbling block for them is the time and effort which goes into supporting the SMS component of Twitter. They put it at ~90% of their time and resources.

Their costs in this are are HUGE. They have people whose sole job is to try and argue down these carrier costs. They have engineers dedicated to working with the flaky, anachronistic APIs. Growing the web and IM portion of Twitter is simple, even in a centralised architecture (IBM MQ would eat Twitter's load for breakfast), but scaling the time and money costs of interfacing with SMS carriers is demonstrably extremely difficult and can't be decentralised.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

James — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:12:09 -0000

Actually, I think that neither of you are right :) The noises from inside Twitter are that it's the hyper-connectedness of the user graph which causes problems (on the web-side and - often overlooked - on the SMS side). Edges go like n^2.

However, put an O(n^2) on a exponentially growing user base and you'll do well to beat exponential scaling!!

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

James — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:09:11 -0000

Yariv did just this, but language choice doesn't beat switching cost so far... http://yarivsblog.com/artic...

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

gregorylent — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:03:14 -0000

imagine the tech rquirements of allowing everybody in the world to talk to everybody in the world all at once ... yike

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:50:34 -0000

What is Twitter's business model? What is FriendFeed's business model?

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Scobleizer — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:20:19 -0000

FriendFeed has a pretty small limit too. It's about twice what Twitter lets you post. That's not very long. Also, if you reply to a Twitter post you can ask it to also send that reply to Twitter instead of just keeping it in FriendFeed. If you do that then you are limited to 140 characters.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

fdsa — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:12:46 -0000

Which telecom problem is like Twitter?

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Jeffrey — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:40:49 -0000

You know, "never" is a very long time.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

narendra — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:45:41 -0000

Maybe all the tech bloggers are simply using the wrong tool. Twitter wasn't really designed as a near synchronous IRC channel and though you and others use @replies extensively, I can't imagine they are more than 10% of the overall behavior.

Amusingly twitter does seem to amplify, accelerate, and distort lots of different things including the ultimate significance of the service itself.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

lemon obrien — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:55:41 -0000

it'll never work.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

George Donnelly — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:28:15 -0000

Comments will always be spread out all over the place.

It's up to the original source to unite all these comment sources into one place.

This brings us back to blogs as the place where conversations take place.

Is it not feasible to unite all the comments on, say, this post, via RSS (and trackback)?

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Nick Johnson — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:18:32 -0000

Oops. Apologies for the double post - disqs's interface tricked me.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Nick Johnson — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:18:24 -0000

I don't think this problem is as insoluble as you think it is. Though it may appear otherwise, the service ultimately scales linearly with the number of users: A user has a maximum update rate that they can keep up with, and you wouldn't expect that rate to increase with the number of users the service has.

It also seems like this is something XMPP pubsub could handle admirably.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Comic Strip Blogger — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:14:30 -0000

David, let's create a solution that is distributed, runs on Google App Engine (but not one app, but several) and that is totally scalable. You can be leader of this effort! I can contribute programming of Google App Enbgine.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Lee Hinde — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:27:57 -0000

It's fairly simple, in Twitter, to block twits that are replies to people you aren't 'friends' with. And, unlike FriendFeed, I never see posts from people I haven't befriended. The top post on my FriendFeed is by a friend of Scoble's whom I've never heard of.

The other problem with Friendfeed and Plaxo Pulse, for that matter, is the repetitive nature of things. I've I've subscribed to someone's blogs rss feed and to Twitter and to FaceBook, why would I want to see your twits in all three locations.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Kyle Ingrelli — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:27:09 -0000

My biggest concern right now is that I've gotten dozens of non-technical users to finally sign up for twitter in the last couple months (after almost a year of nagging them). If twitter goes away and/or everyone else good leaves... then what?

That's been part of my problem with the various social networks all together, once the former hotness has competition, everyone jumps ship (think myspace vs facebook). It makes it really hard to keep a community of users together, especially more casual users of these services.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

Ken Hudak — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:26:49 -0000

Agreed. There must be a place that Disqus can step in here with a solution.

Re: State of the Twitter, June 2008 (Scripting News)

bobbywhitney — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:53:58 -0000

i know some people who have been thinking the same. why is everyone talking about this like it's not shockingly similar to the problems which telecom already deals with?