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In fact, "Twitter is just hosted, proprietary pub/sub" is exactly the type of thinking that I was criticizing in the post. Sure the technology is not difficult

by volaski 14y ago

In fact, "Twitter is just hosted, proprietary pub/sub" is exactly the type of thinking that I was criticizing in the post. Sure the technology is not difficult to implement, but the point I was trying to make was Twitter's value is not in the technology but the realtime delivery network it created.

smacktoward 14y ago
But XMPP does the exact same thing, and it works in a distributed fashion. I can have an instant-message conversation in my IM client over XMPP with messages being exchanged effectively instantaneously. There's no appreciable delay between me hitting Enter and the other party seeing my message, barring problems on the network between me and them; and those problems would degrade my perception of Twitter's performance too, if they were between me and Twitter. While centralized instant-message services exist (AIM, for instance), in 15 years of using instant messaging more or less daily I've never ever had the experience of feeling like a conversation I was having over AIM was happening "faster" than one I was having over XMPP. Never. It has literally never happened. XMPP is performant enough for Google to use it as the IM component of Google Talk. Google Talk is instant messaging. Not "eventual messaging." Instant. Just like the centralized alternatives. Centralized services have some pros over distributed ones -- ease of discovering other users is a big one. But you're just making an assertion that only a centralized system can pass messages back and forth fast enough to be perceived as effectively instant without providing any evidence to back that assertion up.
- volaski 14y ago
  Let's say you hosted your Diaspora or Status.net or whatever on your heroku server. You post something and it gets huge traffic and the server goes down. And this doesn't happen just for you but for lots of people on average. Who will maintain this? In this type of environment, you cannot make any assumptions on realtime delivery. That's what I mean by it's not a technology problem. You can use XMPP in Google Talk since most of the times you're doing 1:1 chat. Twitter does 1:N (where N goes up to as large as several millions), and this becomes a big deal. Does this make sense?

by volaski 14y ago

smacktoward 14y ago

But XMPP does the exact same thing, and it works in a distributed fashion. I can have an instant-message conversation in my IM client over XMPP with messages being exchanged effectively instantaneously. There's no appreciable delay between me hitting Enter and the other party seeing my message, barring problems on the network between me and them; and those problems would degrade my perception of Twitter's performance too, if they were between me and Twitter. While centralized instant-message services exist (AIM, for instance), in 15 years of using instant messaging more or less daily I've never ever had the experience of feeling like a conversation I was having over AIM was happening "faster" than one I was having over XMPP. Never. It has literally never happened. XMPP is performant enough for Google to use it as the IM component of Google Talk. Google Talk is instant messaging. Not "eventual messaging." Instant. Just like the centralized alternatives. Centralized services have some pros over distributed ones -- ease of discovering other users is a big one. But you're just making an assertion that only a centralized system can pass messages back and forth fast enough to be perceived as effectively instant without providing any evidence to back that assertion up.

volaski 14y ago
Let's say you hosted your Diaspora or Status.net or whatever on your heroku server. You post something and it gets huge traffic and the server goes down. And this doesn't happen just for you but for lots of people on average. Who will maintain this? In this type of environment, you cannot make any assumptions on realtime delivery. That's what I mean by it's not a technology problem. You can use XMPP in Google Talk since most of the times you're doing 1:1 chat. Twitter does 1:N (where N goes up to as large as several millions), and this becomes a big deal. Does this make sense?