Disqus - Latest Comments for Blaine Cook

Re: A decentralized Twitter? (Scripting News)

Blaine Cook — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:25:24 -0000

Blaine from Twitter here. FWIW, we have an XMPP PubSub service that allows you to subscribe to public timeline updates. It's currently in "beta", and we're rolling it out as people request it. As far as social network federation goes, it's something that I've talked publicly about since early last year; see my talk from XTech '07 for a general direction, and some of the discussions that came out of the Mediamatic gathering in December for more details. Ralph Meijer (formerly with Jaiku) and I have been discussing the possibility of federating micro-blogging networks since before we met at XTech last year, and really the barrier to doing it is partially a business discussion, and partially a lack of implementors.

There are a whole array of problems with doing the sort of micro-blogging / lifestreaming that Twitter does via RSS / Atom that I'm happy to discuss, but currently I'm a bit too busy dealing with the capacity problems we're facing to do in depth writing on the subject. I will be speaking at a number of events in the next few months, but probably the most relevant (and closest time-wise) is FoWA Miami, where I'll be giving a workshop on building web services using Jabber (XMPP).

Re: FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC? (Scripting News)

Blaine Cook — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:52:07 -0000

Twitter isn't like an RSS aggregator, because (1) it's real-time, (2) it's a push technology, and (3) there is no concept of "read" or "unread"; it's a stream that you can dip into or out of. Twitter is essentially the same as an XMPP PubSub service with a web front end that provides a social layer and access to archives.

RSS doesn't scale to real-time data exchange. Even Google measures their RSS aggregation in the minutes or hours. We (at Twitter) measure our delivery times in milliseconds. Even with the concepts that have been discussed for federation of Twitter-like infrastructures, the delivery time is between 10 to 100 milliseconds. RSS also lacks real concepts of privacy - it's all or nothing; no amount of social overlays will fix that, really. OAuth might help, but it's a hard problem.

XMPP really does do all of these things, but essentially no-one has implemented them. To my knowledge, Twitter currently has the most built-out XMPP infrastructure of any social web service, and we're really aggressively moving towards implementing and launching more XMPP features (e.g., PubSub).

You're absolutely correct about the *use* of Twitter, though --- it's entirely up to the user to decide what it is. Some people use it for jokes, for poetry, for recipes, all sorts of writing. Others use it for diaries, questions, answers, all sorts of community endeavors. Some people use it for system-level logging! I'm not sure that we're blind, just that a simple answer (or question) isn't going to pin it down.

Re: FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC? (Scripting News)

Blaine Cook — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:10:42 -0000

Sure, you can try to use trackbacks, but we don't have an authentication method that can prevent spam. RSS polling is fundamentally broken for low-latency and social applications.

Twitter as implemented scales just fine --- we're running up capacity constraints, which we're working hard to address. It's probably worth noting that during the macworld outage, which affected our databases and web front-ends, our messaging infrastructure ran basically uninterrupted. For what it's worth, the majority of our traffic is inefficient polling-based API traffic (which uses our JSON, XML, Atom, and RSS endpoints).

Re: FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC? (Scripting News)

Blaine Cook — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:12:30 -0000

Agreed (see my other post). Joe and I discussed this extensively at the Jabber DevCon at OSCon last year. Expect more of this.

Re: FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC? (Scripting News)

Blaine Cook — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 13:12:34 -0000

Yes; we just use XMPP's s2s protocol. If you have your own Jabber server, you can configure your account to receive all Twitter updates there right now. The nice thing about Jabber is that its overall architecture treats all servers as equals, and builds in ways for servers to scale at different rates.

Re: eComm - Are SMS reliable?

Blaine Cook — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:27:47 -0000

I don't have strong data on European SMS reliability (one of the problems of having localized networks is that there's no way for me to verifiably test our delivery as a small San Francisco based company), but even though we receive delivery reports, we have a number of users who indicate issues. http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/nolon... is a group of people whose phones do not reliably send us delivery reports.

If carriers that charge billions of dollars per year can't get delivery reports right, then SMS is massive fail as far as I'm concerned. In the US, the reliability is provably bad, and I have often experienced (1) complete network outages (which is a complete failure of SMS) and (2) intermittent SMS delivery droppage, both from Twitter and other people *on the same network* as my phone.

We do our best to ensure reliability, but it's only as good as the weakest link. SMS is reliable only because failure is tolerated and human level retry is low-cost. For automated systems where retries and unreliability are unacceptable, SMS is a major problem.

b.