I have recently being a twitter user, not proud that I become a user or better said a reader. I have blogged before about twitter, but after forcing myself to use it I have a much better opinion about such a service. I like to read some people’s microblogs at twitter. It’s like a big chat channel that you can filter the people that you see. In other words you create your own chat. Does not mean the person that you reading will be reading you back.
Twitter is a great sample of a web application that should be fast and optimize for speed, the user load of twitter is huge, can be hundreds of updates a second from different clients and geographic locations. As you can see the big picture, you can start thinking about the great effort of architecture and thought that had to be under the hood of twitter. A huge undertaking and exciting project in my opinion.
Lately, seems that twitter architecture or the people that design the application, miss that point all together, the application has been going down in regular basis. Maybe due the user load of the hardware issues? Or they might me refactoring the system to undertake such big demand, in any case if you have been using twitter last week, you’ll be getting sick of the error page. I personally hope, twitter comes back soon faster and stronger. There is a place for twitter.
There are a few things that confused me when I started using Twitter, and I learn step by step. If you are new at twitter you may want to read the rest of the post as may help you.
- There are different clients for twitter, as they best way to use it is with a mobile device connected to the Internet. My favorite for the iPhone is called Hahlo.com.
- Other clients allow you to do a little bit more with Twitter, like providing the location from where you using it. My favorite of course is GeoTwitter, but the best one is called BrightKite.com
- To reply a message you add the @ before the users name, make sure is at the beginning of your message or the user won’t see it on their replies.
- There is a report about replies that keeps track of what users gets more replies.
- The character # will group subjects that can be read on this service.
I believe this is what I know by now, only been using twitter for a month. You’ll find lots of useless or useful information by following the right people.
Before you dismiss twitter like I did myself previously, you should give it a chance by setting up the people you want to follow, of course you are very welcome to follow me. Many people that maintains a blog they’ll keep as well an account at twitter and update it during the day. As well as they keep a widget in their blog with their updates.
I see how is very useful in big events to follow presentations or news, update what you are doing or sending links to things happening real time in the technology world. We are asking every year the content to be deliver to us in real time, this is the beginning of that technology. News don’t always mean international news, regional or even local, means what is MVC project people up to and what’s happening at the MIX today. What is my co worker working on and what did he/she found out about LINQ to SQL? News that other people won’t care, is the most important to you.
Something good that twitter came out with, was to creating a generic API so developers can use twitter and create their own clients with twitter, thus GeoTwitter came along, adding something on top of twitter. The success of web applications are link to their design to be enhanced. Another sample here is Facebook, even being second to myspace, they are gaining more users every month. Instead of developers creating their own application a la twitter, they tap into the program to extend it, using twitter resources and database. There are a few arguments on the blogs about exporting data as well as keeping the history. I do believe that twitter could be more useful if google was able to index the messages, after 2 days, messages are being deleted? So that resource or conversation will be erased, blogs still for almost ever, looks like.
Let me recommend you to try it, but wait until twitter fixes their recent issues.
Cheers
Al