That one server needs to handle lots of hits as people view the page, just the same as any other web server. The broadcasting comes in when it also has to push that same message to hundreds of IM and SMS recipients. With traditional IM, one message goes to one recipient (or a few in a multi-user chat).

How do you break something like that to someone like Dave?

If twitter is centralized, basically everything they do is “broadcasting.”

If you look at it as a webservice, this seems bizarre. But if you get your twitters from your phone or IM, it is much more obvious.

= = = I assume you’re paid a salary and get benefits and stock options to do this work.

If so, when you ask me to suggest some links, you’re basically asking me to work for free, right? So your stock can be worth more as well as the other shareholders of your company?

Now I do this for a lot of companies, I know when I’m doing it I’m being a chump, but if I love the product, I do it anyway. But…

Sorry, not only don’t I love your product, even if I did, I doubt I’d help the company. = = =

buuuuuuut he expects TwitterCo. to drop to their knees and offer up people and time to sate his obnoxious, intrusive, utterly-irrelevant curiosity?

It’s not like Mahalo’s asking him to edit, say, Perez Hilton’s page on their site, or be a regular unpaid contributor to their site in general.

You’d think, ego-driven as Dave is, he’d be interested in any prominent representative collection of DaveFacts out there. And really, I’m sure he IS, but he’ll put out a word to his minions and have THEM do the work for him. All UNPAID, of course!

Nevermind that he’s frequently asking for assistance, links, ideas, comments on his own blog, Twitter, and elsewhere. Any of those people getting paid, Davey? It’s OK to work for free if they’re working for YOU for free? Is that right?

So typical Dave does one thing and expects everyone else to abide by entirely different rules, depending completely on how much he benefits from them.

How does our planet sustain his ego again? And more distressingly, imo, who are all these chumps sucking up to him and doing all his dirty work that don’t grok that they’re getting played, like, daily?

There’s a big difference between sending a message between two individuals using a single protocol and sending a message by one of several protocols (web, sms, IM, etc) and broadcasting it to thousands of users also using multiple protocols.

Twitter is centralized. Where’s the broadcasting?

People, process and finance come first. Get those under control and engineering fixes the bottlenecks.

Not always. Look at Technorati.

I pick on Rails here because this is exactly the kind of service it’s not made for. There is not much to the front end of Twitter, the magic is all in the backend. And the magic is apparently running slowly. Even 37Signals rewrote a key part of Campfire (a web chat service, sort of related here) in C because Ruby couldn’t keep up with real time chat when a decent number of users came online. If it can’t keep up with a simple chat program, there is no way it will keep up with Twitter.

At the simplest level, the number of hits to the website to view messages would be similar to the digg or slashdot effect. Meanwhile, it’s also being pushed out to hundreds or thousands of recipients via SMS & IM.

If twitter asked the VC’s for a few hundred million they could re-architect the infrastructure and scale as well. But in the process Evan would loose his company. H’s going to wather this phase of growth on the cheap and cash in when someone buys the business for the user base.

Most problems of scale face the constraints of funding, people and process before the technical issues are even a factor.

The Twitter Ruby meme is pretty superficial. It reminds me of:

Ebay Java Amazon what ever Google Linux

People, process and finance come first. Get those under control and engineering fixes the bottlenecks.

McD: There’s no technical difference between Twitter exchanging messages in a browser and AOL exchanging them in an IM client. Twitter, given its technical challenges, shouldn’t be having these downtimes. They must have shitty or horribly overworked coders.

WordPress.com does it without Rails. And really inefficient messaging.