With Friendster, they got progressively more complicated the more users they got. On the other hand, MySpace was able to grow without any problems because they

With Friendster, they got progressively more complicated the more users they got. On the other hand, MySpace was able to grow without any problems because they had a much simpler setup. The question to ask is whether a competitor can do something better. I don't use twitter, but it sounds like any competitor would also have to be doing a similar number of database queries. So, any competitor would still have to go through what twitter has, so twitter is still ahead by now focusing on the scalability. Twitter has to move people to a non-rails platform as soon as possible. The whole point of rails or visual basic 6 is to develop a prototype really quickly and change your ideas to find the one that works. If the problem now is the speed, just pretend you're a competitor and do what the competitor would do in your situation. A competitor wouldn't be recreating the failed versions of Twitter; they would just copy the current idea in C or whatever the fastest method is, since the business idea and execution is more valuable now than flexibility, now that the business idea has been discovered and twitter doesn't have to spend time making so much changes. Except, Visual Basic 6 programs are very fast on modern computers, and they run on each user's computer separately, so you wouldn't want to rewrite them for Windows if it already exists and works.