The Open Source Technology Behind Twitter 81
caseyb89 writes "If it weren't for open source technology, you wouldn't be able to tweet. Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager at Twitter, shares how open source is vital to Twitter's success. He states that using open source is a 'no-brainer' for Twitter because it 'allows us to customize and tweak code to meet our fast-paced engineering needs as our service and community grows.' Twitter also established an open source office about a year ago to support a variety of open source organizations that are important to them. Aniszczyk will discuss Twitters open source usage in his keynote at LinuxCon."
Re:Yeah right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but now 140 characters is part of twitter's culture and identity. The fact that the SMS limit doesn't exist anymore doesn't matter one iota.
What is twitter without banally short attention spans?
Re:Yeah right. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Twitter was really based on an open source model, they would have fixed that 160 character limit a long time ago; It's a relic of a bygone era.
The identica people can't seem to decide on a limit.
http://status.net/2010/02/15/identi-ca-character-limit-results [status.net]
http://status.net/wiki/Identica/web [status.net]
This is very much like the desktop publishing situation in the 80s... people whining that they can't express themselves without using 45 different fonts and 5 colors on a page... Newsflash is they can't express themselves... at all... a tech feature isn't going to fix that.
Re:"you wouldn't be able to tweet" (Score:4, Insightful)
Having to write all of that software themselves may have set the barrier to entry too high for them to ever get started. Even a small increase in start up cost can be the difference between a product or service launching or never even being attempted.