Twitter juggles tweets from more than 240 million people across the globe, with about 5,700 of these mini-messages sent every second, and this enormous stream of digital information gets stored on thousands of servers inside the company’s vast network of data centers. Because it contains so many types of data — from links and video to the bits of meta-data you don’t see — even a single tweet is spread across multiple machines. The trick lies in finding ways of grabbing all the right data from this sea of machines and rapidly delivering it to your phone or PC.
.. But about two years ago, Goffinet, Schuller, and Avital created Manhattan. According to the engineers, it lets the company expand across new machines much more easily than it could with Cassandra, and it lets them run both eventually consistent and strongly consistent applications.
Obama Joins Twitter Universe (but He’s Not Following You)
But early indications suggest that the Twitter conversation may be more one-sided than he realizes. As of Monday evening, Mr. Obama was following only 65 other accounts, which mostly included the institutions of government: @HUDGov, @USTradeRep, @USTreasury and, of course, @FLOTUS. He was also following several Chicago sports teams, his college alma maters and two politicians: Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush.
But so far, no ordinary people. If Mr. Obama spends any time scanning his Twitter timeline on Tuesday, he is not likely to get that outside-of-Washington, bear-is-loose feeling that he so craves