(2009-07-17) Twitter Leak

Tech Crunch got a bunch of confidential Twitter documents. They're putting some of it online.

Some of their discussion was about becoming the first Web service to reach one billion users. The notes are laid out in bullet points with each one reading like a Tweet: "If we had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet." In the meeting itself, Stone tries to put his finger on what Twitter is by calling it more of a "nervous system" than an alert system.

• Dave Winer thinks this underscores his feelings about why this should be an open protocol, not a corporate-owned system. Chuck Shotton comments The hubris behind their drive for a billion users belies their complete lack of engineering expertise and cluelessness about how to architect a large system, one that should have been distributed from day one. The only existing systems on the Internet that have a billion users are DNS, EMail, and the HTTP backbone of the web itself. And all are as decentralized as you could want. (Well, maybe not DNS, but that's always fixable). IMO, Twitter is a toy to be experimented with until it breaks and is replaced by a properly implemented solution that will persist, scale, and be as open as the protocols above.