I'm truthfully not even sure what the Twitter Whale is even about.  Why the whale?  I get the birds, you know, they tweet, but whale's mostly just blow air out of their blow-holes.  That's not the point of this post, however.

Twitter is over-capacity.  It's an interesting phenomenon, and one we haven't seen as much since the days of busy signals while trying to dial in to AOL.  Remember that?  6th grade never seemed so far away.  But realistically, Twitter blew up so fast, that I don't think they really had time to factor in scalability as a lifestyle until much farther down the road.  Hence the whole, Ruby-Integer-Too-Small Twitter debacle.  While it may have seemed like an impossiblity when they created the site, and probably never crossed anyone's minds, there are serious dilemmas to not incorporating a strict vision of scalability at the outset.

We try in our development teams to think ten years from now.  Now, that's probably unrealistic, as anyone with a 10-year-old website will tell you, "Never have a ten year old website", it make sense for us to try to see our customer's industry in ten years.  This helps us to reflect on our own work, and how our solution will be affected by business.  If they are going to have 20 retail outlets instead of the original 2, how will that affect their reporting?  Their site admin screens?  Their layout?  Does anyone want to see a directions page with 20 stacked Google Maps stretching the page a mile long?  Probably not.

More on this later, Twitter is back up.