Fred’s wrong (or quoted out of context)
July 22nd, 2010[Twitter breaks] because “it wasn’t built right — Twitter was built kind of as a hack and they didn’t really architect it to scale and they’ve never been able to catch up.” – Fred Wilson
This is wrong.
Twitter wasn’t built as a hack, it was just built. The way you or I might build something new, in a couple of weeks, with some databases, and a couple of cron jobs, and a daemon or three. If they had built it [portentous voice]TO BE TWITTER[/portentous voice] they would have failed.
Scaling is always a catch up game. Only way its ever worked. If you never catch up then something isn’t working, but it isn’t original sin.
4 Comments
[...] Fred’s wrong (or quoted out of context) – agreed. [...]
Nope, I think that was about what he said at geoloco
HI Kellen, i just arrived here from seeing your link on twttrs Top Tweets page. Anyway, I love your comment here about scaling twttr. Very cogent it is. Be well, Steve D.
Kellen,
With all due respect, I do not agree with you, at least insofar as the infrastructure is concerned. The subject deserves a more thought out comment than a quick comment paragraph.
BTW: It was nice meeting you at the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club; however, I do need your email address to correspond privately.