
No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter - swohns
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/how-twitter-handles-traffic-from-the-japanese-who-tweet-like-no-one-else/
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josephschmoe
"built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak"

Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant
portion of its readers are engineers, right?

Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are
pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...

~~~
dragonwriter
> Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?

I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical
community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been
viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in"
to technology.

So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant
portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.

~~~
solarmist
That's my impression of Wired as well, but this still seems a bit egregious
even for a layman's tech news site.

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limaoscarjuliet
I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over
the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the
folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit
login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not
enough to handle that ;-)

~~~
rambojohnson
> they shout "HAI" hit login button.

what?

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ggreer
Twitter's engineering blog posted about this phenomenon last year.[1] It's not
as in-depth as I'd like, but it does contain some technical/architectural
details about how they scaled to deal with such high traffic.

1\. [https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-
record-a...](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-
how)

~~~
ufmace
That's a far better description of what happened and the result than the
original linked article.

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jgalt212
Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no
matches, so this might also be related.

Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those
characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in
utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx
2X.

Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters =
140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized
sentence.

~~~
nrinaudo
Japanese is often encoded in Shift_JIS, which is much better than UTF-8 (for
japanese text). Most browsers default to that encoding on japanese OSes, so
there probably isn't a real bandwidth issue, depending on the ratio of browser
to dedicated client usage.

As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better
content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word
- the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms.

On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to
Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for
phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western
words are used - western words are almost systematically written with
katakanas.

Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous
example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.

~~~
FreezerburnV
I know it's such a tiny point, and very much off topic, but please don't
"pluralize" words such as Kanji, Katakana, etc. As someone who has spent a lot
of time learning Japanese, and who knows that Japanese words don't change
between singular/plural (with certain exceptions, such as attaching "-tachi"
to a word), seeing you write "Kanjis" or "Katakanas" so many times in a row
really bothers me.

I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.

~~~
SunShiranui
Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as
pizze?

~~~
epaladin
It's more like the plural of 'deer' being 'deer'. I don't think I've ever
heard anyone attach an 's' to 'kanji' for pluralization when speaking English.
Like how it might be odd to say 'sushis' or 'wasabis'. Whenever I need to
stress plurality i would say 'kanji characters' or something like that. Oxford
English Dictionary lists 'sushi', 'kanji', 'shinkansen', 'katakana' all as
being mass nouns or having the plural form the same as the singular. The
exception in the words I looked up was 'tsunami' which may be pluralized as
'tsunami' or 'tsunamis'.

~~~
chc
Most of those _are_ the sorts of nouns that wouldn't normally be pluralized in
English. "Sushi" is like "rice" — specifies what the roll is made of rather
than the roll itself. We don't pluralize the name of a rail system like
Shinkansen because there is only one of it (similarly, "the L" but not "the
Ls"). But there are many Japanese loanwords that are commonly pluralized
differently in English. For example, futons, tycoons, typhoons, tatamis,
ninjas and kimonos.

It's ambiguous whether "kanji" is a mass noun referring to the character set
as a whole or a singular noun referring to a character in the set. I think
it's both. So it seems hard to blame someone for being unclear on the matter.

------
ibisum
The 'no downtime' thing really rings true with me .. during my personal time
working in Japan I found I'd become accustomed to the fact that it was just
'normal' to be going into the office after a few beers and working another
shift .. to the point where, when I returned to California, it was really
bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home and - except for
a few hardcore hackers - life just seeped out of the office space(s) we called
a workplace. I guess the different physical characteristics of the two
locations has a lot to do with it, not to mention culture - back home (at the
time) in California it was not at all weird to be spending up to two hours on
the commute, just sitting on the freeways in ones car, completely alone tuned
into whatever bland offerings the radio waves proferred, while in Japan I
don't think I had a car-ride longer than 30 minutes the whole time I was there
(airport lift) .. and there is something to be said for the vital 'energy'
that imbues a place like Tokyo at 9pm in the evening on a Tuesday, where most
of the world is still at work. Albeit drunk, at least in a good mood, but
nevertheless: still working. I got used to heading out at 10pm on any workday
and feeling really _alive_ out there in the walking streets, like there wasn't
a "shutdown" period before 12am.

The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the
International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to
disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years
go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old
California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still
spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal
that life was ..

~~~
w1ntermute
> I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California
> associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a
> really inordinate amount of time on the freeway.

You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours
at the office every day and never see their families, even though they
probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.

~~~
ibisum
> You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14
> hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they
> probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.

I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to
them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and
less time doing things that were highly destructive to their health on an
immediate basis, like .. sitting in traffic for hours, being very un-social,
breathing in smog.

EDIT: Is it a 'cultural downvote', or something else I said? Because my
Japanese friends still don't 'get' why Americans think its so vital to have so
much private time being spent 'on the road'. This is very definitely a
cultural artifact, people ..

~~~
capisce
Maybe a daily walk in a park and/or 30 minutes of meditation could be better
for their health than spending 12 hours in the office with a break of having a
few beers each day. Seems like you're posing a false dilemma between spending
the full day in the office and having a two hour commute each day - it's
possible to choose neither of those. Are you sure your colleagues are so happy
about their situation?

~~~
ibisum
Oh, I missed that part out - certainly, my Japanese associates at the time got
a _lot_ more walk in the parks than you might think. For many of them it was a
vital part of the way home.

I just don't think the city planners of America in the 20th Century were as
sensitive to these issues as they _should_ have been. We cannot deny that the
automobile-economy made America _very_ unhealthy, and it wasn't until the era
of the gym that this became lesser of a health issue. Even still today,
though, by direct personal (thus: anecdotal) evidence, I can say without a
doubt that my American friends are far, far less healthy than the Japanese
side. Alas, its just a fact - even if we factor in the binge-work and
alcoholism. Not a popular perspective, but I think Americans need to get some
humility about this factor and stop building such monstrous cities with such
dependencies.. okay, this is now outside the scope of the original article,
which was fundamentally about the differences between cultures and how it
affects technical deployment decisions, but - after all - this is
fundamentally an Architectural problem as much as it is a cultural one (and
the two cannot be dissociated, really..) In the end, could the Twitter
difference really boil down to just how well the space of the two countries is
utilized? I think it does, ultimately, play a role in this discussion.

~~~
capisce
I absolutely agree that long commutes are bad, but I still don't think that
excuses Japan's overwork (Karoshi) culture. According to surveys Japanese
employee satisfaction ranks relatively low compared to other countries:
[http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/summary/200906/0...](http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/summary/200906/02.html)

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kelukelugames
This is fun localization issue. Kind of like water usage during World Cup
games.

~~~
wisty
And power -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup)

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hawkw
As a Scala enthusiast, it's neat to see one of my pet languages get press,
but...a "software engineering technology called Scala"? Did you mean
"programming language"?

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philip1209
I wonder whether concurrent write operations in a single data center or the
load of achieving consistency between data centers caused more issues.

