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Is twitter really that unique? I know mindshare wise, it has front-of-the-bus valuation, but the technology behind it is quite simple (and should be written up
by brianobush 16y ago
Is twitter really that unique? I know mindshare wise, it has front-of-the-bus valuation, but the technology behind it is quite simple (and should be written up as a RFC).
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThe technology behind twitter is trivial in the abstract. At scale it's decidedly non-trivial. See also: paypal.
- brianobush 16y agoGoogle has solved many of the hard problems that would render twitter a trivial. I am not declaring a 150 line python script would duplicate it, but that Google could easily build a similar service. Now mindshare is a different story.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoYes, but no. Google's systems are tuned to google's apps, twitter is similar but also different in some fundamental ways. The complexity of rendering every individual twitter feed is pretty significant compared to, say, gmail, and the same optimizations do not always make sense. Moreover, the complexity of the SMS back-end should not be dismissed. While google certainly has the chops to handle all of these problems, including SMS, it's still a bit much to say that google engineers could reinvent twitter better and faster with little effort. The biggest piece of evidence that this is the case is the simple fact that they haven't yet. Despite trying (see: buzz).
- jon_dahl 16y agoTwitter is a network that is used by 150 million people. It is embedded deeply into thousands of software systems. Millions of people consider it an important part of daily life - maybe more important than things like newspaper and cable TV. Every day, Twitter publishes (and collects) something like 50m tweets, and their database contains maybe the best record of what's happened in the digital world in the last few years. That's unique.