I’ve heard a lot about Twitter recently, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’ll report back on my thoughts, which may seem strange to American readers, but Twitter is still very niche in the UK.

It’s certainly a big change from Facebook, which I’ve never been a huge fan of. Facebook seems quite walled and moated in some respects, whilst on Twitter you get inundated with scraps of information from all comers. Its a whole different experience – something akin to instant messaging on speed. The basic concept behind Twitter is that you post regular updates on what your up to, and by doing this you communicate with other fellows. But its not like having a conversation with one person, but rather a pushing and pulling of information amongst a whole community. The possibilities are mind bending when you consider that these communities can number in the hundreds or even thousands. When these people subsequently spread the information to their friends, the effect is like a nuclear information bomb going off.

This is me after starting on Twitter.

This has provided some unique challenges to the developers of the site, because every time a person posts something, that information is copied to their ‘followers’. The load on the servers is unbelievable when you consider the number of copy operations which need to be performed in a short period of time. Consider what will happens when Apple makes a new product announcement, or the US presidential elections are announced. Handling such vast volumes of data requires a robust software infrastructure. The site was originally coded using the Ruby on Rails framework, which is pretty much the de facto standard amongst Web 2.0 start ups, largely because of its efficiency in terms of coding time, and its sophisticated feature set. But word is abound that the whole thing may have to be coded again in PHP or Java to help the site scale more efficiently.

The most successful start ups usually don’t have to worry about this kind of thing for long, because the likes of Google and Yahoo come knocking, cheque book in hand. The problem is, the founder of Twitter also founded another web stalwart – Blogger, which was purchased by Google a few years back. After the acquisition, the founder left, as many web entrepreneurs are prone to do having experienced the stuffy confines of a corporation, even of Google’s nerd friendly ilk. So the likelihood of Google or Yahoo acquiring Twitter is unlikely, because a considerable part of their investment is in the talented people who create the sites.

Twitter will undoubtedly sort itself out, but its likely to take a little longer than if a larger parent company stepped in and switched the operation to their own servers, with all of the reliability improvements that would entail. But not since the early days of Youtube have I felt so expectant of a Web 2.0 start up. Undoubtedly it will grow larger, and I’m heartened that a new service like this has come along. The last thing that I want is a single pre eminent social networking site, and Facebook is arguably heading in that direction. Facebook is trying to integrate everything into one service, and I’d rather hand pick a particular service for a particular need. And as it stands now, Twitter enables people to do things, both socially and technologically, unthinkable even a year ago.

There’s currently a big race going on to see who can get the most followers. If you’re familiar with the tech podcasts TWIT and Diggnation, then you’ll know that most of the presenters have around 20,000 followers. One of them, Leo Laporte, has almost as many followers as Barack Obama. But what if more people cotton on to the power of Twitter? Leo Laporte is very well know amongst certain circles, but what if mega-stars like Tom Cruise or Britney Spears start ‘twittering’? It’d be bedlam. So lets keep this secret for now. Ok?