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:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything of widespread use is going to acquire idiot users. With that said, Twitter is far more useful and worthwhile than most "social" platforms out there. I put "social" in quotes because you could just as easily follow a couple of information sites or key developers on a project and your twitter becomes a centralized news feed rather than people talking about the latest annoyance on their way to work.
I was skeptical of it at first too but it's surprisingly useful if you follow the right people.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was skeptical of it at first too but it's surprisingly useful if you follow the right people.
For a lot of people twitter is what rss was supposed to be. Except that RSS does a better job of it than twitter does.
I really don't get twitter... all the real use cases people like are much better served by RSS.
Re:open source when it's helpful (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter actually releases a ton of code and patches. See: https://github.com/twitter
They seem to believe in actually giving back..