Twitter is still an early-adopter application, and if the system is running into scale issues already it's unlikely that it will be able to keep up when mainstream adoption occurs.
Twitter appears to have a fundamental design flaw that's not easily dealt with. It was designed to be a stand-alone system functioning in a multiparty/multiprotocol world. In the current architecture Twitter is an application, where it really needs to be a distributed system.
Maybe Twitter needs enterprise service bus (ESB) functionality that runs in enough distributed locations (Yahoo, Google, Amazon.com, desktop) to ensure that messages are reliably delivered. This could be achieved in a wide variety of ways without having to maintain a massive infrastructure like the carriers do for SMS. It would also enforce pervasiveness and adoption.
The fact that Twitter is based on Ruby on Rails is probably only part of the real issue, though Ruby does require a fair amount of tweaking to run reliably. Scale issues are less likely to happen with PHP or Java, but Ruby apps are generally easier to build.
I came up with a few analogous systems that might help to explain some of the technical ways Twitter-scale could be achieved:
... Read moreUsing book sales as surrogate tea leaves, Mike Hendrickson of the O'Reilly Radar finds life bleak for pretty much every major programming language except C#, Javascript, and Ruby. Java? It has plunged by 50 percent since 2003.
Sun Microsystems is hedging its bets on web scripting languages, recently adding Python experts to its fold. So perhaps Sun will weather the storm. Regardless, even despite its five-year slide, Java still holds the biggest share of the book-buying market, as this chart shows:
... Read moreLast week, Benchmark announced a $3.5 million investment in Engine Yard, which provides commercial support for Ruby on Rails applications. Engine Yard is doing $3 million in business and growing. It's also profitable. It didn't need the investment.
The investment, however, is very telling. When one of the top venture capital firms on the planet puts hard dollars behind a support model, it's significant. It becomes doubly so when the firm (or its investors) in question previously invested in JBoss, MySQL, SpringSource (Interface21), and other support-based open-source companies.
It may mean that Benchmark knows something that the rest of the industry seems determined to ignore: services-based businesses may well be the future of the software industry.
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