What is twitter? I've been asked this more times than I can count. Some people point to it as a form of micro-blogging. Reality is that it is instant messaging for those of us outside the 13-21 age bracket. Anything I send to twitter gets read by all my subscribers and when one of the people I subscribe to types something into twitter, I see it in return.
And the next question I always get is, "Why?" And I used to feel indignant. "Because it's cool!" or "Why not??" I might have exclaimed.
Only most of the time, there is little of value on Twitter. There is the intermittent question and response, but this is awkward to accomplish inside Twitter-dom. And then there is the infrequent URL of something big that is going down or new and interesting. But most of the time, it is just what someone is doing at that moment in time or links to funny cat photos.
And today was no different until I saw a twitter message from the Frith-ster. He was announcing a live stream from his phone in China.
One could easily say that the "live" part was a little less than spectacular, as it was more herk and jerk than anything else. I might re-frame this by stating that sitting in my underwear, I was able to see something streamed from the other side of the world mere seconds after he had pressed record on his phone. Talk about mind-bending. I can only imagine what it's going to be like in a year or two when bandwidth issues are even rarer.
Bringing it back to Twitter and the downward spiral of value to content, I believe the lesson here has to do with scale.
When building an application, how we deal with scale is a critical issue. And something, I have to admit, that I haven't given due weight to in any interaction design project I've ever been involved in. The status-quo seems to be to assume slow or even constant growth. But what happens when we have hundreds of people a second joining our service? Or thousands?
The days of this being an extreme test case are over.
Scale should no longer be an issue just for load testing. Twitter offers next to no systems for filtering, cataloging or tagging content. And they are not alone. New services like seesmic are going to have to face this as well. (Seesmic is like twitter, just using video instead of typing.)
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