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Did Twitter Founders Run Away With All The Funding Money?
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The infamous micro blogging site Twitter was initially used for internal purpose by San Francisco Startup Company called Obvious, LLC. It all began in March 2006; Twitter was started as a R&D project. In October 2006 it was opened to all. Since then it has been busy creating history.
How do people benefit from Twitter?
Research Tool – Once my close friend had said to me “when in doubt…keep shut.” But today I can surely prove him wrong. Today whenever I have a doubt I tweet about it. And very soon my followers answer to it. This is has also helped me for my research.
Breaking News – Twitter is said to be a prime place for breaking news. Events like marriage proposals too have taken place.
Customer Solutions – Companies like Dell have been using Twitter to respond to their customer queries.
More uses of Twitter can be read here.
Though this all looks good for reading but the major problem that every one of us faces with Twitter is its services always being down.
In one of our earlier post we had blogged that Twitter blog says that Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.
Is this the reason behind Twitter being down? I guess not.
Although Twitter was architected to be a content management system people use it as a messaging system. Here is an example on how Twitter works: If Mr. X has 10,000 followers and if he tweets that particular tweet is then received by all 10,000 followers unless it is a direct message to a specific user. Now the main issue is that not everyone access Twitter from the parent site. People use different applications to access Twitter. These messages then go into a database, which then figures out how those messages are to be delivered to each of the followers. At times this overloads the database and cause Twitter to function abnormally i.e “down” In simple words they need to have more servers.
Recently Twitter had received $15 million funding which was reported by GigaOm. I wonder what they did with it. They should have utilized it for the development of its services. In a recent blog post from Twitter blog talks on how they are going to utilize their new funding money. Still we are clueless about the previous funding.
Twitter blog says –
Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.
May be it is getting a bit late. As Twitter lovers are now getting restless and are switching over to other options. What are these options? You can read them here.
Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.”
“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”
So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.
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Did Twitter Founders Ran Away With All The Funding Money?
If you want readers to take your posts seriously.. two things:
1)English.. English… should be “Run Away” not “Ran Away”
2) This post has borrowed generously from Silicon Alley and Valleyway… At least acknowledge that…
@ RajG - Do excuse me this time. Mistakes do happen..especially when u one is in a bit hurry…lol. Regarding the borrowing thing I can assure u that i have linked where it was needed.
PS. Nothing has been borrowed from Silicon Alley and Valleyway
I thought I had read something similar… apologies for the same…
No worries
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Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.”
“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”
So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.
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Here’s my two cents.
For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don’t understand this and they don’t care.
They don’t know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8×8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.
I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don’t care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News Mermaid
They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use.
Great insight peter..