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I wrote previously that Twitter's architecture is not scalable for real-time messaging . Indeed, the Twitter development team talked about this recently . Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we've tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that's introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. Dare Obasanjo recently looked at the issues and implications and suggested that it's not the technical architecture to blame, but perhaps rather the logical model. If Twitter was simply a micro-content publishing tool with push notifications for SMS and IM then the team wouldn't be faulted for designing it as a Content Management System (CMS). In that case you'd just need three data structures...
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