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there isn't anything special about twitter. It's the people that use it that give it value. your average programmer could build twitter. obviously there are som

by hnriot 13y ago

there isn't anything special about twitter. It's the people that use it that give it value. your average programmer could build twitter. obviously there are some scale issues, but the value of twitter has more to do with the users than the tech behind it.

benjamincburns 13y ago
>your average programmer could build twitter. obviously there are some scale issues, but... I'm going to be nice and just assume that you're so completely surrounded by competent and successful people that you overestimate the capability of "your average programmer" and underestimate the difficulty which Twitter's variety of "some scale issues" would pose to "your average programmer." The community is the externally visible thing which gives Twitter value, but that community wouldn't exist without some really awesome technology providing it the capability to exist.
- ArtDev 13y ago
  The point is, the original technology is not special at all. Its about branding, name recognition and value. That is why Twitter is not overpriced at all. Neither is Facebook and that website sucks :)
  - benjamincburns 13y ago
    No, the point is that the original technology is incredibly special, but the simplicity of the service and the "big data" boom it helped create makes it all look insignificant in hindsight. I challenge you to go set up a twitter clone using only software which existed in, say, 2008 or earlier, or software which you write 100% yourself. To test it, rent a small swarm of AWS servers and get 10,000 fuzzing clients to hammer on the thing. Should be a fun weekend project, right? I agree with the sentiments about the brand and the community, but anyone who thinks that just magically appeared like it was some inevitable fatalistic force of history is dead wrong. It took a ridiculous amount of ridiculously hard work by ridiculously smart people. And if anything the fact that I have to point this out is a testament to how excellent and valuable their work really is.
dirtyaura 13y ago
You haven't been building twitters, have you? (I have, I was in a team that build Jaiku, microblogging service that Google bought in 2007). An average programmer couldn't build Twitter. Even with only 100K users, you start to hit interesting scaling problems that are specific to activity streams. (For example, should you use inbox or outbox model to construct the streams). They are well understood now, but they were not well understood in 2006-2007, when Twitter (and Jaiku too) had constant scaling issues.
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  2 points: 1. Of course an average programmer could build twitter. It would just take a very long time. 2. "Not well understood in 2006-2007" is the key. Its easy to say "I could build blah-blah-blah in a weekend" now. Because that's after the non-average programmers at companies like twitter figured out all the hard problems.
  - benjamincburns 13y ago
    I think you're dead right on point number 2. The reusable components that are pouring out of today's "big data" boom make building simple-but-large services much, much more approachable than even just a few years ago. But point number 1 is a bit like saying "of course you can factor a 2000 digit number into the two primes which created it, it would just take a while." This is an awfully oversimplified way to put it, but without launching into a long diatribe wrought with lots of smaller generalizations, I'll just use one big one: it's been my experience that the average programmer is typically no better than a very buggy compiler for a fairly low-level subset of natural language. I come to this perspective as someone who does a fair amount of hiring for a government contractor. Government contracting is the place where the average to sub-par programmers go to find work. The pay is "good enough" but crappy compared to private sector, and the people you work for range from disgruntled (if you're lucky) to incompetent. But it's a very stable and reliable way to earn a living, as cost-plus contracts have promoted an environment where anyone with a resume can get a job, and where your pay is dictated by how many years you've been in the business (correlated strongly to how old you are). Very few people have the "dive in and solve the problem" mentality that it takes to build something like Twitter, even using bleeding-edge tools. Fortunately we live in a world where the number of people who do have that talent is quite large, it's just that the number of people who don't is much, much larger.

by hnriot 13y ago

benjamincburns 13y ago

>your average programmer could build twitter. obviously there are some scale issues, but... I'm going to be nice and just assume that you're so completely surrounded by competent and successful people that you overestimate the capability of "your average programmer" and underestimate the difficulty which Twitter's variety of "some scale issues" would pose to "your average programmer." The community is the externally visible thing which gives Twitter value, but that community wouldn't exist without some really awesome technology providing it the capability to exist.

ArtDev 13y ago
The point is, the original technology is not special at all. Its about branding, name recognition and value. That is why Twitter is not overpriced at all. Neither is Facebook and that website sucks :)
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  No, the point is that the original technology is incredibly special, but the simplicity of the service and the "big data" boom it helped create makes it all look insignificant in hindsight. I challenge you to go set up a twitter clone using only software which existed in, say, 2008 or earlier, or software which you write 100% yourself. To test it, rent a small swarm of AWS servers and get 10,000 fuzzing clients to hammer on the thing. Should be a fun weekend project, right? I agree with the sentiments about the brand and the community, but anyone who thinks that just magically appeared like it was some inevitable fatalistic force of history is dead wrong. It took a ridiculous amount of ridiculously hard work by ridiculously smart people. And if anything the fact that I have to point this out is a testament to how excellent and valuable their work really is.

dirtyaura 13y ago

You haven't been building twitters, have you? (I have, I was in a team that build Jaiku, microblogging service that Google bought in 2007). An average programmer couldn't build Twitter. Even with only 100K users, you start to hit interesting scaling problems that are specific to activity streams. (For example, should you use inbox or outbox model to construct the streams). They are well understood now, but they were not well understood in 2006-2007, when Twitter (and Jaiku too) had constant scaling issues.

ojbyrne 13y ago
2 points: 1. Of course an average programmer could build twitter. It would just take a very long time. 2. "Not well understood in 2006-2007" is the key. Its easy to say "I could build blah-blah-blah in a weekend" now. Because that's after the non-average programmers at companies like twitter figured out all the hard problems.
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  I think you're dead right on point number 2. The reusable components that are pouring out of today's "big data" boom make building simple-but-large services much, much more approachable than even just a few years ago. But point number 1 is a bit like saying "of course you can factor a 2000 digit number into the two primes which created it, it would just take a while." This is an awfully oversimplified way to put it, but without launching into a long diatribe wrought with lots of smaller generalizations, I'll just use one big one: it's been my experience that the average programmer is typically no better than a very buggy compiler for a fairly low-level subset of natural language. I come to this perspective as someone who does a fair amount of hiring for a government contractor. Government contracting is the place where the average to sub-par programmers go to find work. The pay is "good enough" but crappy compared to private sector, and the people you work for range from disgruntled (if you're lucky) to incompetent. But it's a very stable and reliable way to earn a living, as cost-plus contracts have promoted an environment where anyone with a resume can get a job, and where your pay is dictated by how many years you've been in the business (correlated strongly to how old you are). Very few people have the "dive in and solve the problem" mentality that it takes to build something like Twitter, even using bleeding-edge tools. Fortunately we live in a world where the number of people who do have that talent is quite large, it's just that the number of people who don't is much, much larger.