Twitter moves to 139 characters, saying "Rails just won't scale to 140 anymore"

Dateline: Thursday, May 1st, 2008 - The day Rails scalability was the news.

In a sharp response to TechCrunch's erroneous report that Twitter was divorcing Rails because of performance issues, Twitter management responded, "No, that's just not true. However, we have decided to limit users to 139 characters, because 140 is just taxing the system."

Furious Twitter power-users didn't hesitate to respond. A common comment was, "How am I going to punctuate my tweets?". From another user, "Oh, I thought that number meant I had 140 seconds to finish my tweet". Finally, James Buck, maybe the most famous Tweeter of all, said, "Sure, my first tweet was one word. But my second tweet was the name of the Egyptian prison I was in, and it took all 140 characters... I still might be there if it wasn't for that 140th character."

Twitter also promised additional changes to the UI, in response to all the alleged performance issues by the press. Said management, "We are taking a bit of a sharper tone with users, in hopes that they will stop the bitching."

In other news, Lew Cirne launched his new Rails performance start-up today. Welcome to the party, Lew.

Comments

[Doug Levin]

This is priceless!

See my blog post on Twitter's astronomical valuation: Twitter - Where's the Pony?

http://bduck1.blogspot.com/2008/04/twitter-wheres-pony.html