Cousin Mikey is taking an interest in Twitter

Sunday, June 01, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Mike Arringtoh wrote a post yesterday about architecture issues in Twitter which was mostly pretty good, though his last question is very lawyerly and off the wall, no way one person is responsible for the problems with Twitter, and if there were one person, it would be the CEO not a programmer. 

I sent an email to Mike and even tried to call him, but he's not answering, so I'll just get him the info here on Scripting. If you know Mike and he reads your email, please send him a pointer to this piece and say hi for me!  

Here's the message: It's pretty likely you can buy or license off-the-shelf software that does more or less what Twitter does. (Probably more.) The problem of reliably sending massive numbers of notifications quickly was solved a long time ago in the financial services industry, apparently. Think about it -- the stock markets and banks have to do this, and if they drop out like Twitter does, billions of dollars would be lost, maybe the whole economy! There would be a lot of good reasons to throw lots of money at this problem.  

The pointers came up during an extensive discussion about decentralizing Twitter's architecture here in January. 

It made sense to me -- I encountered these kinds of people when I worked in NYC as a programmer after graduating college in the mid-70s. That the software has been commodified since then is not surprising. 

I've tried to suggest to the Twitter management that they take this route, but haven't gotten through. 

Maybe someone should look into the idea of just adapting technology the enterprise guys are using? 

Just a thought.