I don't want to be arrogant, but from the technology point of view Twitter is nothing. Write it in a way that scales better, write it in 170 lines of Scala or 10 lines of Lisp, you still haven't done anything. Come up with the idea before anyone else, get millions of users, that's the difficult part.
First of all, I'll say that this (really neat sounding) project doesn't necessarily fall into the following category, the title just reminded me of a pet peeve of mine...
I'm always skeptical of the claims of "do this amazing thing in x lines of code" where x is some ridiculously small number. For example, the prototypical 10 minute Ruby on Rails blog, or the 1 line of code WebKit-based web browser.
The problem with these things is they make great whiz bang demos, but they really don't take any less code, it's just that you don't have to write that code because it's already written for you and hidden behind a layer of abstraction... which is great, as long as it can also be applied to real world problems, not just little toy demos.
With a name like Skittr, picking a name can be tough,
Skitter is Irish slang for diarrhoea (or a wee kid). As Twitter is a form of verbal diarrhoea, then SKittr is as good a name as any for a competitor! ;)
Well, I didn't read the entire article, so maybe there was an answer to this but I'm a bit weary of claims like "can be modified to scale linearly with the number of machines with 1 week of coding".
The main difference in effort between a Scala/lift and Erlang/ErlyWeb implementation is that making the Erlang app distributed and linearly scalable doesn't require any coding. Just store the process IDs in Mnesia and when you add more nodes add those nodes to the Mnesia schema and you're done.
Not having to restart your Erlang server (and therefore lose your client connections) to do code updates is also pretty cool.
I was making a joke ;) However, looking at the scala code it doesn't look like it is written to scale at all. I can't really see any thing in it that indicates it was written in a certain way. Its more a pattern to follow I guess.
This whole thread smells of lack of understanding of software. Hackers should know how inefficient an SQL server would be to handle Twitter-type tasks, versus specialized code. This is supposed to be hacker's news, not small business news.
news.YC is a good example of an efficient architecture. If it was written in Ruby/MySQL, pg would need at least 20 servers to keep up with the current traffic, versus a single box now. And the latency would never be as good as it is now.
