6 ms·

Whats app comes to mind as a comparison. Far more complex. A billion customers. 35 engineers.

• mschuster91 10y ago
  Nah, WA started as a 1:1 direct messaging service with next to no server storage - so all the backend had to do was to distribute the incoming messages to the recipient ASAP in order to keep storage load low. Twitter's backend is far more complex, you have a 1:n distribution (with n occasionally drifting into the double-digit million counts, like President Obama), and all the messages have to be archived and live searchable.
  • ryhamz 10y ago
    Agreed. The keys to making whatsapp work were tuning an XMPP server for and the Erlang VM for performance, which takes a few very smart people, but not a large quantity.
  • snowwrestler 10y ago
    And targeted ad sales, the complexity of which should not be underestimated.