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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is clearly brilliant and creating a viral and useful product. I admire everything they've achieved in terms of user adoption and usefulness.

They're proven without a doubt that technology is only one ingredient and it doesn't have to work well for a web or mobile business to grow.

They're the last company I'll look to for technology to use in my business or as an example on how to run operations. I have no interest in any of their open sourced products or in any advice from them on how to run my data center.

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I honestly did not understand if you were being sarcastic in your third paragraph.

I'm still not sure, but it seems you're peeved that Twitter hasn't been perfect and not impressed with Rainbird. (Right?)

This is a bit unfair I think? No one's really waiting for your advice on how to run your data center, whereas Twitter is dealing with the sort of volume that your data center probably couldn't begin to handle without finding some of the same solutions Twitter is now presenting.

Now we could possibly (depending on what you actually meant) get into a debate about Twitter's failures, but that's really not interesting, because your second paragraph is true: technological perfection is not enough by itself.

That doesn't mean Twitter doesn't have anything interesting to say about technological perfection.

But mostly I posted this in order to express the sheer confusion I felt reading your post. If you don't like Twitter, just say so.

On what basis? Because they've been through some rough patches where they couldn't keep up with the traffic, you'll dismiss everything they've built?

I agree with his general sentiment, I'd only phrase it differently.

The point is not that they've been "through some rough patches". The point is that they failed for years to come up with a reliable implementation of a solved problem; pub/sub messaging.

Twitter is not "large" by any means. Your telco, stock exchange and many other companies have dealt with the the same problem-space for decades. Those reliably dispatch orders of magnitude higher throughput under much more complex routing conditions. Many of them operate under SLAs that mandate five or even six nines of availability.

Sure, twitter is (gladly) not dispatching emergency-calls, as such their requirements are lower. However, given their track-record they're in no position to give technology advice either.

50 million tweets/day[1] is not a serious workload for a messaging system.

http://mashable.com/2010/02/22/twitter-50-million-tweets/

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