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Re:Dave Winer: "Twitter is a ghost town" by SwellJoe on Saturday June 07, 2008 @05:15AM (#211478)
OK. I trust you've built the scalable replacement for Twitter already and were just waiting for the opportune moment to launch? Now's the time!
Re:Dave Winer: "Twitter is a ghost town" by axod on Saturday June 07, 2008 @06:21AM (#211490)
Would you not agree that Twitter is a subset of the functionalities found in existing technology that does scale? email, IM networks, blogs...

Obviously you're entitled to your opinion about sending messages being a very hard problem, but I think it's been solved a few times now.

Re:Dave Winer: "Twitter is a ghost town" by notauser on Saturday June 07, 2008 @07:19AM (#211498)
All of those systems apart from IM follow the same route to success - a large number of independent systems with a common interchange format that makes it possible to create the illusion of integration.

Every mail server, every news server, every blog is a little island that runs on it's own. I would bet that behind the scenes even the big IM networks are actually a mountain of small, effectively independent, service providing systems that understand how to talk to each other - that's certainly how the XMPP/gTalk network functions.

This is only possible because all of those designs are fundamentally highly parallel - if your communication method has data dependencies (real or the result of bad design) that cannot be managed in that way then you get something that won't scale.

Re:Dave Winer: "Twitter is a ghost town" by SwellJoe on Saturday June 07, 2008 @04:16PM (#211686)
your opinion about sending messages being a very hard problem

I said scaling Twitter must be a hard problem, and that it will involve correcting their implementation rather than any one magic bullet. I said nothing about IM, email, blogs, etc.

You've decided that I'm talking about something that I am not.