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The Twitter Mesh Is Driving Me Insane

Grab a pencil and a very large piece of paper. Lay it on the floor. Now go to your computer and surf to Twitterholic.com. Then take the top 15 - 20 people off that list and write their names on that piece of paper on your floor. Now look at the numbers under the heading “Followers.” Is your hand cramping up yet? No? It will be soon…

Now draw 35,898 little circles around Leo LaPorte’s name while going to his Twitter page and writing the names of each one of his followers inside each circle.

Tomorrow, or the day after when you’re done, move down the list to Kevin Rose and do the same thing for him and his network, BUT, this time you have to figue out who on Kevin’s list of followers is also following Leo so you don’t have any duplicates on your list.

Hmm. Maybe drawing lines between Leo, Kevin and the crossover people would be a good idea so you don’t lose track. Now on to U.S. presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. How many of the people who are following Leo and Kevin are also following Obama? Good question and one that would save a lot of time since you wouldn’t have to write all the crossovers 2 or 3 times.

Wash, rinse and repeat for the first 15 people at the top of the Twitterholic list. What does your large piece of paper look like?

Now, imagine that those 15 people all posted one single 140 character tweet at the exact same time, and that all their followers were being sent that tweet instantly, via their personal page, Twhirl, their iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever other handheld device or API sucking desktop or online app, or widget or… they’re hooked up to.

Now here’s the REAL challenge - find one single web server (physical machine) with a single dual core processor and 2gig of RAM that could handle those 15 tweets and the cascade that happens in the miliseconds thereafter, without the thing melting into a blob of sizzling metal and silicon. I dare you.

How many computations would that be in total? How about if you threw in the replies and http pageviews that happen over the next several minutes, Plus the ensuing discussion surrounding those 15 tweets? I need another drink.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on the Twitter team. If they can scale that damn thing to 10,000,000+ active users with 100+ followers and about 30,000,000+ more occasional accounts who follow 99 or less people, they’ll need divine intervention.

…and the really scary thing is yes, even I know I’m grossly oversimplifying the entire Twitter process!

Posted: Fri 5.23.08 @ 8:38pm EST by Paul Short