opportunity__cost

http://live.prokhorenko.us
Jul 4 2011

Twitter is shifting into JVM

Last year the company announced that both its back-end message queue and Tweet storage had been re-written in Scala, and in the spring of 2010 the search team at Twitter started to rewrite the search engine. As part of the effort, Twitter changed the search storage from MySQL to a real-time version of Lucene. More recently the team announced that they were replacing the Ruby on Rails front-end for search with a Java server they called Blender. This change resulted in a 3x drop in search latencies.

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Mar 9 2010

Quick-poll related to the "followers" value

I was interested in how much value does Twitter followers generate, if any at all.  Technically, this means that 10K of followers sounds like a lot and it could be a good number to evaluate.  (According to rather old data (almost one year old), average Twitter user has 126 followers only.  It might go up these days, but I don't think it went up more than twice or thrice.  For example, my @iwhite has less than 400 followers.  So, yeah, 10K is a lot.)


I have run the experiment and know the right answer now. :)  Lets see how close are you.


http://www.polleverywhere.com/multiple_choice_polls/NjU5NzU3NDM0


I'll share my data in a week.  I'll also include the results of this poll, if it would make any sense by that time. :)
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Feb 23 2010

Cassandra @ Twitter

MyNoSQL: If you draw a line, what were the top reasons for going with Cassandra?

Ryan King:

  • No single points of failure
  • Highly scalable writes (we have highly variable write traffic)
  • A healthy and productive open source community

Interesting interview with Ryan King @rk about Cassandra at Twitter.

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Nov 20 2009

Yahoo! Pipes for Twitter's Reading List

I've managed to create a very nice and probably useful Yahoo! Pipe to manage my Twitter friend's feed as a reading list.

As you know, nowadays it's a common practice to post interesting links to your Twitter feed. Even I personally hooked up my Google Reader with the help of Twitterfeed to post articles that I want to share directly to my feed on Twitter. Works well, except that I miss a lot of links. I can't read my friends feed all day long (and I'm following only a hundred or so people). So whenever I read the feed (very occasionally) I can hit the shared links of only that period of time. I don't browse history or anything like that.

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However, I'd probably like to read all the links that they advice to visit. I'm pretty picky about whom I'm following. You can call it social news. Where your social circle is doing the job on filtering the news for you. And you end up with a list of "pre-approved" things that you're safe to go with, without high risk of wasting your time.

Anyways so I run into this venture and built a quick hack for myself.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/white/twitterreading

I call it Twitter Reading List. You put your name & password in there (yeah, I can be a asshole and copy your data, so take a look at the source first if you're afraid of it :), and you will get a RSS feed of all posts from your Twitter friends, whom you follow and who posted something interesting. This pipe will fetch a title of it for you, as well as link it to direct link to whatever your friend wants you to read.

Well, yeah, on the negative side, I don't like the idea of sending my password plain-text, but... whatever. One more thing, it looks like it's limited to some specific number of posts there. It's probably possible to overcome, I don't know.

So fire it up, link to your Google Reader or any other favorite news reader and have fun!

P.S. IT IS buggy. It's a dirty hack and I need to fix the regexp for URLs among many other things, but it works.

P.P.S. Yahoo! Pipes rock. This is definitely a great way to easily sketch up a tool and use it right away. Try it yourself.

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Oct 13 2009

Giveaways thru Twitter

It seems that different drawings, giveaways and just ad campaigns are getting high on Twitter nowadays.  

So I thought that it's an appropriate time for the product performing the full-cycle of running a giveaway on Twitter, giving the owner full set of tools to monitor activity, choosing the winner, publishing the results; as well as providing an entrant's with some analytics on the competition they are entering into, as well as some statistical calculations (according to different giveaways run though the product) on how many tweets do you need to post, what's the typical profile of the winner, etc.  

This product doesn't need top be an academic innovation though.  It should be:

  1. Easy for businesses to use.  (It should NOT be free.  Charge for it!)
  2. Fun, Fun, Fun for entrants.  Stimulate.  Advertise.  Entertain. (Do you see an extra value for #1 already here?)

That's it folks.  Anyone?
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About Olexandr Prokhorenko

My name is Olexandr Prokhorenko. I am passionate about building products that users *love*.

My LinkedIn profile is www.linkedin.com/in/white.


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