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Axod, you're absolutely right, I am amazed that your voice is drawning in this river of absurd. Twitter IS a freaking reimplementation of SMS, a not-too-hard pr
by tx 18y ago
Axod, you're absolutely right, I am amazed that your voice is drawning in this river of absurd. Twitter IS a freaking reimplementation of SMS, a not-too-hard problem that has been solved many many many times before (on a much weaker hardware). Most folks here just don't get it. Perhaps it's because texting has never been really big in US like it has always been in Europe.
Moreover, Twitter's load is a joke compared to what leading telecoms have been dealing with for many years. If there were serious about recruiting they could have hired someone with experience to do just that. Without this typical "distributed everything" mantra. Twitter isn't freaking Google or Amazon, they have ZERO computational complexity, they simply move (and store) up to 400 bytes of data for _not even a million_ of active daily users, how hard could it be?
I suspect the reason we see such embarassing technical failures is because software engineering these days is less about engineering and more about playing Lego with pre-existing open source parts, even if they don't fit together or even don't fit at all.
- dcurtis 18y agoI've never seen a "leading telecom" messaging system send my single message simultaneously to a thousand people via email, sms, IM, and a web interface within a minute. SMS by itself is slow, unreliable, expensive, and only goes point-to-point.
- tx 18y agoSMS is more capable, by far more reliable and complex system than Twitter. (guess how do I know?) Most Americans are unaware of it because it has never been popular here due to pricing differences but it's changing. SMS are multi-casted more often than you think and the load I've seen were several times that of Twitter. I am not calling anyone stupid or incapable, I suspect it's just a side effect of "release early, release often" mantra. And don't exaggerate for the sake of exaggeration: how many Twitter users have "thousands" of followers?
- maximilian 18y agoI actually think quite a few people have "thousands" of followers. I don't have anything to back this up, but I think you'd be surprised as to how many people follow the more popular people on twitter.
- axod 18y agoIn the UK, SMS is pretty well used, very cheap, and does not only go point to point. You can specify a list of destinations in each message. Phone carriers like O2 routinely send SMS out to their entire customer base announcing new offers/deals (Unless you text stop). Football announcements - if you opt in, as soon as a goal is scored, they send SMS messages out to thousands of interested fans instantaneously. I used to run a ringtone website and dealt with these sorts of things. Perhaps SMS is slow and unreliable in the US, but not in europe. Each message has with it a message longetivity which says how long it should stick around in the system trying to deliver itself. Also you have successful send notifications for that rare instance a message could not be delivered.