

Why Twitter just raised $200m. - swombat
http://swombat.com/2010/12/15/why-twitter-raised-200-million-dollars

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kondro
I would find it interesting if many mobile networks in the world that support
many more users and many more messages per second will have even spent $460m
on their SMS/MMS infrastructure.

I understand that Twitter is different, but 65 million tweets a day is only
what, 2,000/second burst @ 3.2Mbps and 13GB per day of new tweets
(4.7TB/year). And that is only their recent volume (2010-06-08:
<http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/twitter-190-million-users/>).

I know that Twitter made the decision to put the data at the location of
access (in this case, that makes it the end-users 'inbox') however, that means
that the more popular a user gets (say Gaga with 7.3m followers), every tweet
they make needs to be delivered 7.3m times and cause, say 1.5GB of
data/traffic to be generated, especially when we're only talking about
5TB/year of new, raw data.

Surely a model more like Google's search infrastructure makes more sense.
Store tweets in clusters. Send a search request for all tweets less than
X-minutes old to the clusters, the search clusters each return their results
in parallel to the caller who then merges & orders the results before
returning to the user.

The clusters would replicate data based on popularity (e.g. Gaga may have 10
copies of her data throughout the cluster, compared to me with a couple dozen
followers having just one). 5TB + replicas is more than enough to store in
memory among a couple-hundred servers and the load generated on the total
system would be based on those accessing data rather than producers with a
large amount of followers tweeting.

To build this infrastructure to date they have raised $160m and, unless this
$200m is completely unnecessary, they have spent most of it.

Anyway... I seem to have gone a little off-topic and gotten a little ranty
however, the total amount of money being spent on a company with no long-term,
sustainable business model just seems ridiculous. It's as though the VC's have
already spent too much money on building a massive network that they need to
keep propping it up so they don't look like fools.

~~~
wowfat
" more popular a user gets (say Gaga with 7.3m followers), every tweet they
make needs to be delivered 7.3m times"

\- Do they really need to duplicate the same tweet 7.3 million times? The
tweet cant be edited too!

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gordonbowman
Great points. These funds will surely be used to turn on the money faucet.

Also interesting is the fact that they brought David Rosenblatt on to the
board.

As peHUB notes,

 _"Also joining Twitter’s board is David Rosenblatt, who was long the CEO of
DoubleClick, then chief of Google’s display ad sales for roughly a year after
it acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. (He left Google in April of
last year.)

Certainly, though, for a company that looks to supercharge its revenues,
bringing on the longtime CEO of one of the world’s biggest ad serving networks
looks very smart."_

[http://www.pehub.com/90776/kleiner-muscles-its-way-into-
twit...](http://www.pehub.com/90776/kleiner-muscles-its-way-into-twitter-
stake/)

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ig1
That's property prices in London for you...

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helwr
they will sell it, probably to Google

just need some money to survive a winter or two

