> It's hard to make that realtime, because you'd need to some sort of broadcast every second or at least every few seconds.
Twitter isn't realtime either - they say they don't succeed to stay within the 5 seconds all the time, and when Gaga tweets it takes up to 5 minutes.
Furthermore, I was talking about broadcasting a request for updates on demand when needed. PGM/UDP can blast through hundreds of megabytes per second on gigabit connection. That's quite easy. 22MB/sec is nothing, even 100MB/sec is not much these days (though you might have to bond/team to make that reliable)
> It's hard to follow a lot of people (you could be getting a large number of replies), so there would need be a follow limit.
Not at all. Make the replies (at most) 5 tweets from each person you follow, with a "and there's more ..." flag in the reply, have the front end ask for more if it makes sense once the 50ms is done.
It's ok if the 300 people who follow one million people take 200ms instead of 50ms to get a reply. And if you want to make it quicker for them, have these ones (and only these ones) on a "push" rather than "pull" model. The vast majority of people follow less than 50 people, perhaps less than 20.
> Facebook has a follow limit and people don't really expect Facebook to be realtime - the central bit is not really.
People do expect facebook to be realtime, it mostly delivers (better than twitter), their limits are not hard (I know people who asked and got them lifted within a few minutes).
> Also, there is no one right way to do these things, in my view.
No, but there's a lot of wrong ways, and twitter keeps choosing among them.
Twitter isn't realtime either - they say they don't succeed to stay within the 5 seconds all the time, and when Gaga tweets it takes up to 5 minutes.
Furthermore, I was talking about broadcasting a request for updates on demand when needed. PGM/UDP can blast through hundreds of megabytes per second on gigabit connection. That's quite easy. 22MB/sec is nothing, even 100MB/sec is not much these days (though you might have to bond/team to make that reliable)
> It's hard to follow a lot of people (you could be getting a large number of replies), so there would need be a follow limit.
Not at all. Make the replies (at most) 5 tweets from each person you follow, with a "and there's more ..." flag in the reply, have the front end ask for more if it makes sense once the 50ms is done.
It's ok if the 300 people who follow one million people take 200ms instead of 50ms to get a reply. And if you want to make it quicker for them, have these ones (and only these ones) on a "push" rather than "pull" model. The vast majority of people follow less than 50 people, perhaps less than 20.
> Facebook has a follow limit and people don't really expect Facebook to be realtime - the central bit is not really.
People do expect facebook to be realtime, it mostly delivers (better than twitter), their limits are not hard (I know people who asked and got them lifted within a few minutes).
> Also, there is no one right way to do these things, in my view.
No, but there's a lot of wrong ways, and twitter keeps choosing among them.