How does Twitter work?

cotton31 · 9 Jul 2009 at 23:06

Technically and as a business?

Technically, I'm guessing it's a database with a users table and a tweets table, with each tweet attached to a user? That simple? Obviously not expecting someone to know the full ins and outs.

And as a business - how does something like that take off? How does it make money?

I'm doing some research into social networking, and these are a few of the questions I have.

Thanks in advance for any info.

mr.sly · 9 Jul 2009 at 23:38

I can't tell you about any of the technical details, but I know it uses this for the database.

Cassandra

You can check out this blog post of how it got started.

As for making money, I don't think they do at the moment. They rely on investment and they will probably turn towards ads or paid accounts in the future.

darubio · 10 Jul 2009 at 01:50

google it or wiki it

monkeysmith · 10 Jul 2009 at 07:03

I never really thought how they made money till you posted...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Finances

Always assumed there were adverts and I either ignored them or Adblock was working well.

Tripnologist · 10 Jul 2009 at 08:37

mr.sly said:
As for making money, I don't think they do at the moment. They rely on investment and they will probably turn towards ads or paid accounts in the future.

This is true. They don't make anything currently.