Does that mean they were right to go off and try to reinvent the wheel – no, IMHO they should have really gone down the Jabber route and laid source based routing on top.

And you know I prefer Jaiku (as a social tool) right?

The social application – you're right it doesn't support threading, has some scaling problems

The platform – is more than capable of supporting threading, extends brilliantly using HTTP

I think the real problem is that so many people see Twitter as a single (and limited) use application, not a demonstration of how an application can be built over a messaging platform.

What was described is XMPP, a messaging platform for applications or services that just happens to be really good at IM. If Twitter had been built on top of an existing XMPP platform it probably wouldn't have had so many issues later in life.

I have intimate knowledge of the Odeo platform that these guys built before Twitter and that had some really shoddy architecture! Given it's performance I'd take an educated guess that Twitter started out as a similar collection of hacks and hasn't fared well since.

It's a shame that so many people still use Twitter, it's userbase is it's only strong point! If they all moved to Jaiku (which, admittedly has had it's own share of growing pains but has restored SMS and IM functionality) we'd all be much better off!

its lovely – but its over capacity/down half the time
it cant cope with converstaions/comments
and its not great at extending beyond pure html devices.

i still love it – but its not a do it all thing.

From the conversations I've had over the last couple of years it is apparent that Twitter was designed to provide a messaging platform for applications/services – the first use case of which was Twitter as we know it, a social IM if you like. Twitter have grown the service (IM) to the point where it has stress tested the infrastructure to and beyond breaking point, gone back and rearchitected / fixed / tweaked / whatever so as to get things as robust, stable and scalable as possible.

I don't think the guys there ever anticipated the platform's primary use as the IM it essentially is, rather as a service orientated message routing platform with cool things like source based routing built into the syntax.

Now that isn't to say that i) the current interface is anything but crap, or ii) that A.N.Other company cannot utilise the platform to build a better service.

To that end applications like Tweetdeck go a long way to solving the first problem of UX.

I'm by no mean qualified to critique Twitter's technical architecture or protocols but looking at it as an ecosystem enabling messaging platform I reckon it has legs in it yet.

2008/10/23 Disqus <>

Interestingly, that's one of the main reasons I no longer use http://www.twitter.com. I use the mobile sites like dabr.co.uk and twitstat which show images in line and un-shorten URLs.