Konstantin Ubanezko Personal Blog

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Am I Done with Facebook? Twitter FTW!

I got a message from Facebook today saying that someone had friended
me. I realized I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care about the
person who’d friended me–I didn’t care about Facebook. It’s been
weeks since I was there and my life is pretty much the same.

I think the reason is Twitter. Twitter is much more social, much
more interesting, and the plethora of clients (including any mobile
phone with SMS) means that I don’t have to remember to go check the
site to see what’s happening. Twitterific displays a solid stream of
the 140 character thoughts of my friends.

Because of Twitter, today I know:

• There were tornados in Denver and Laramie
• Twitter posted an article about their
  architecture on their blog
• There’s a blogger dinner tonight in Salt Lake City
• @tylerwhitaker
  and @bradbaldwin aren’t
  going to carpool to
  the blogger dinner

I like that.

Twitter has scaling problems even though their user base is reportedly
quite small. As Nik Cubrilovic points
out, Twitter isn’t like Wordpress or Digg. Twitter is a group
forming network (GFN). When a Metcalfeian
network adds another user, the number of potential connections
goes from N² to (N+1)². When a GFN adds one
more user, the number of potential connections goes from
2^N to 2^(N+1). In case it’s been a while since
you’d done that math–it’s a big difference.

To make this more real, consider TechCrunch’s twitter account. When
TechCrunch, with almost 18000
followers, sends a message, that results in 18000 messages–one
to each follower. This
is like the phone system with infinite, always-on conference call
capability. Sure,
you can do things internally to collapse some messages, but you’re
still dealing with exponential growth.

Cubrilovic points out that this feature creates some serious engineering
problems getting Twitter to scale. AL3X at Twitter argues
that they’re not blind to the problems and they’re working on them.
There are dozens of people blogging about what kind of architectural
solutions might lead to better uptime at Twitter.
AL3X’s final plea: if you’re so smart, come work for us. Good answer.

Tags:

facebook

social+networks

twitter

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Save as Basket Archive in 0.6.1 Beta 1

Now that the stable 0.6.0 basis is there, I’m proud to announce you that new awaited features are coming nicely.

First feature to be released: basket archives. Lot of people asked to be able to save baskets in single files. To be able to backup baskets, but most importantly, to send baskets to somebody else by email, USB pen… while that other person can be able to open the file in BasKet Note Pads, modify the baskets, and send back the changes to you.

Yes, this feature is fully accomplished. And it is available right now in 0.6.1 Beta 1. As usual, you can see screenshots and download that version on the development page.