After reading about all those issues about twitter, I wondered why their messaging backend wasn't simply using email. Every user has both an email address and a mailing list that allows only its owner to post a new message. Following a user is to simply subscribe to that user's mailing list. And so on.
Email is quite scalable, so for twitter's backend that would work well. The rest (web pages, accounts, etc.) can be done with a distributed MySQL cluster, as usual.
... Or am I missing something?
Published on June 13, 2008 at 13:21 EDT
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