The Open Source Technology Behind Twitter

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...

[MightyYar]

Calling someone a name is not sarcasm.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

"Why is the entire Internet against me?" wondered Sarcasm Nazi Racist, Jr.

Re:

[Zapotek]

Sure it is...genius.

Re:

[MightyYar]

Touche...

Re:

[MrHanky]

You were ridiculing in an ineffectual and impotent manner, relying on trite clichés of the kind made popular by people who know nothing about what they talk about. It's not sarcasm. Sarcasm is said to be the lowest form of wit, of which your comment was completely lacking.

Re:Hmmm...

[Piata]

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...

[vux984]

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:

[fbobraga]

twitter is far more than a "read-only" RSS: RT, Reply/DM - and it is easy to use for non-techies...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop bringing facts into this discussion, it disrupts our goal of replacing all modern technology with a combination of 1990s protocols such as Usenet and IRC.

Re:

[vux984]

fair enough. and good point. But the use cases where people cite "twitter is really useful" tends to be to follow a particular news feed.

retweeting is rarely more than just noise, unless the rt is through an aggregator account... but then its really being used as news feed by its followers and the rt functionality isn't much more than a couple seconds of copy/paste with any RSS feed/aggregator.

As soon as "normal users" start retweeting; its usually just worthless noise.

reply/dm -- true enough that they are

Re:

[MightyYar]

Some differences vs. RSS:

- Enforced limit on tweet size
- Text only (so worked with even simple phones via text message)
- I'm not sure I could figure out, in a short time, how to set up an RSS feed that can be updated via SMS.

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Assuming slashdotter level of competence it should be easy. SMS sent to email, fetchmail and a simple script should do it pretty well.

Re:

[vux984]

- Enforced limit on tweet size

And everybody agrees this obsolete.

Text only (so worked with even simple phones via text message)

RSS subject lines are text only as well.

I'm not sure I could figure out, in a short time, how to set up an RSS feed that can be updated via SMS.

Yes, and one of the big features of iOS6 is that Siri will be able to tweet for you too... but this is not something I can imagine needing.

SMS -> RSS gateway isn't the most natural way of updating a news feed anyway.

If I were hosting an R

Re:

[MightyYar]

If I were hosting an RSS feed (or more likely multiple feeds), I'd surely have an app on my phone to update it (them) and it would be dead simple to setup and use.

You'd have ended up with something like Twitter. Smartphones were not yet very common. Feature phones could run arbitrary Java, but most carriers limited the apps you could install. Short of a carrier deal, that left SMS for the mobile interface.

Re:

[cpu6502]

Per usual what is "popular" is typically not the best technology available. Look at game consoles: Atari 2600, NES, PS1, PS2, Wii were not the most powerful consoles of their generation but they still obliterated the rest.

Super Audio CD and DVD-audio were both superior to the MP3s and AACs, but sold poorly. And now we have twitter which you claim is inferior to RSS, but that doesn't really matter to the general populace.

Re:

[Sigg3.net]

I agree. Twitter is nothing but a forum of RSS feeds, but it has one thing; brand recognition. If you tweeted, you're a twat.

--- @sigg3net on identi.ca.

Yeah right.

[girlintraining]

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. They also would have added some extra privacy and patched the security vulnerability in the EULA module.

Re:Yeah right.

[i kan reed]

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:

[cpu6502]

>>>The fact that the SMS limit doesn't exist anymore...

It doesn't? Last I heard if you enter a really long text, the phone software will divide it into 2 to 3 SMS sends of 128 bytes each, and then double or triple-bill you for that text.

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Last I heard they could use the twitter app or email instead of SMS and not worry about it at all.

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Many feature phones do email.

Re:

[schroedingers_hat]

You've never met the electronic mail man? It's called email for a reason.

Re:Yeah right.

[vlm]

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:

[Hatta]

Isn't the 160 character limit a limitation of the SMS protocol, and not Twitter?

Re:

[romiz]

The "concatenated SMS" protocol, which removes this limit in exchange for a higher message count, existed before twitter started to be relevant: It is defined in GSM/3GPP release R99, which was already widely deployed even in low-cost devices in 2006, when twitter was created.

Re:

[EMR]

And how many people honestly have their twitter feed sent to their phone via SMS?

Re:

[gl4ss]

and the sms protocol has nothing to do with twitter really + you have had multipart sms's before twitter was born.

the limit is more about them being cheapskates with hw at the beginning(due to not having money) and it making building the infrastructure cheaper. ALSO as it was used mainly as "one liner"(remember those from bbs's?) replacement on web-pages originally it didn't matter that much since the real content would have been on the blog the tweets were about.

open source when it's helpful

[manicpop]

Much like Google, Twitter embraces open source when it benefits them, even as they are in the process of locking down their API and making the service more "closed." It says a lot about open source that tech companies are finding so much benefit in embracing it as PART of their strategy, but the Twitter platform itself will never be completely open source, because Twitter knows it benefits them to keep it closed.

Re:open source when it's helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter actually releases a ton of code and patches. See: https://github.com/twitter

They seem to believe in actually giving back..

Re:

[manicpop]

Open source in the corporate world is a not a matter of "giving back" -- in terms of, let's say, a "charitable donation" -- it's all about what's beneficial to the company and what they are REQUIRED to give back due to open source licenses. We shouldn't be thanking Twitter for being a part of the open source community; they've obviously made a business decision that contributing to the community benefits them. If they cared about open source more than other business decisions and (potential) profits, they'd

Re:

[manicpop]

Ah, that's helpful. Perhaps Twitter is not the best example of the point I was trying to make but the overall idea is this: Companies that take a pick-and-choose approach to what code is open and closed are contributing to the open source community for their own benefit, which *generally* benefits others as well. It says a lot of good about the community. It doesn't necessarily make the companies reasoning for doing so good or bad. You could say it's neutral, like eating a sandwich, if you get my somewhat o

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[rhsanborn]

Twitter embraces open source because it's FREE as in beer. It's much easier to bootstrap a company with free stuff. Everything else is a side benefit.

Re:"you wouldn't be able to tweet"

[sqrt(2)]

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.

Re:

[Kergan]

One could also argue that you were able to tweet in spite of Twitter using open source for a long time. Remember the days when they were using Ruby on Rails?

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Very much agree. They could have just as easily built the same service using proprietary software. Their licenses may have cost more, but would probably completely eclipsed by the cost of paying their employees anyway.

Re:

[gbjbaanb]

you make the mistake of assuming closed source software is better than open source, and that Twitter would be able to purchase licences for a twitter-feed product someone else wrote.

Twitter undoubtedly would be ok with any platform when they started, but today they have so much scale they need to tweak that code, the close source platform would have to be rewritten completely in something, at least the OSS stuff gave them a big head start.

You're right that staff costs are big, but when you're serving so man

Re:

[rudy_wayne]

You're exactly right. Using open source software might be cheaper and may have allowed them to get up and running faster, rather than having to build their own from scratch. However the claim that "'it allows us to customize and tweak code to meet our fast-paced engineering needs as our service and community grows." is completely meaningless. If Twitter was running on closed source software that they developed entirely on their own, they would still be able to tweak and update it as much as they want, a

This is news?

[cpu6502]

Slashdot's new meme. (I've noticed it's now popular to post this on most articles.)

Astroturfing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it weren't for open source technology, you wouldn't be able to tweet.

The article sounds like an astroturf for Microsoft.

The president says:

[OhSoLaMeow]

Twitter didn't build that.

Take Care at LinuxCon ..

[dgharmon]

At all times have a third party independent potential witness present at all social occasions. This to provide corroboration against any future false accusations of harassment, sexual or otherwise. There may be persons patrolling the venue with the sole purpose of perceiving such harassment and trashing your reputation in the media. Remember if they'll target Shuttleworth they'll tarnish anyone. If only Deep Thought could saves us all from humorless single-issue fanatics.