Twitter as a Case Study
So Twitter is down, again.
Twitter, a great idea, but terribly designed and implemented…
Twitter is a great case study:
- for what a badly designed piece of software is all about,
- for what not do, or what to avoid, or how NOT to architect and deploy software (i.e. by avoiding everything they have done so far),
- for how to NOT design and deploy your SaaS system.
But not everything is negative here; there are a lot of lessons learned, I am sure… I wouldn’t mind taking a look at what they have done, again, as a case study…
And maybe the folks at Twitter should write a book (or set of articles) on the things to avoid / not to do, when designing networked, high-availability web-based, messaging SaaS-based systems…
Update (June 8): Bad design, but perhaps, bad capacity planning….
ceo
I agree with you Enrique, twitter was the first and has introduced the idea of MicroBlogging. but twitter is NOT the MicroBlogging itself, and twitter seems to loose now their reputation.
btw, this article on ReadWriteWeb contains the further analysis and there are lots of interesting comments under it-
“What’s Killing Twitter: Twitter Gets Help Digging its Grave”
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/whats_killing_twitter.php
Based on the “What’s Killing Twitter” article I would recommend a complete re-write of the service in PHP or ASP instead of Ruby. It wouldn’t take long to do (a few weeks) considering how simple the service is.
“Twitter’s architecture was not made for a messaging system, which is what Twitter has become”
Hmm. Has it ever been anything other than a messaging service? If so, what was it then?
One very intersting question is: Where does the Twitter company get revenue from? They don’t advertize, and they don’t have paying users. Do they sell user stats?