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Comment by bialecki | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is one of my favorite examples of this. Lots of people look at it and say, "it's so easy implement to build." I'd like to see them scale it to millions of users.

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I'd be surprised if anyone thought building Twitter with similar scalability would be easy. Sure while you cold fit it into 1 mySQL DB it would be easy to get the basic features down with a much simpler UI and no API. Past that though they would be vastly underestimating the work.

scaling twitter is easy. it is getting the users that is hard. I can say this because I was part of a service in 1999 that had more users and volume (bytes/hits/etc.) yet didn't have nearly the same issues.

I can say this because I was part of a service in 1999 that had more users and volume (bytes/hits/etc.) yet didn't have nearly the same issues.

Not to be rude, but I doubt it.

Twitter currently has 175 million users[1]. Estimates in 1999 for the online population of the entire internet were 259 million, with 110 million in the US [2].

In 1999, I imagine Yahoo and maybe a couple of other sites (Microsoft/Excite/AOL/Lycos?) were getting similar traffic numbers to what Twitter does today. BUT the scaling is very different, because Twitter requires fan-out of messages, which none of those sites did.

[1]: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371826,00.asp

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20000208141450/http://c-i-a.com/1...

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