Comments on persistent.info: Determining Twitter's Growth

I don't use Twitter. Never have even looked at it....

2007-03-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

I don't use Twitter. Never have even looked at it. Too busy reading about it.

John A. Davis
Lazy Dancer Blog

But, how many people are still using it? I'm sure ...

2007-03-16T10:14:00.000-07:00

But, how many people are still using it? I'm sure there is an HUGE part of the user who forget that service after one or two messages... But I can't prove it.

It's interesting to see Joshua's post laid out lik...

2007-03-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to see Joshua's post laid out like that 'cause they're the same lessons we learned with LJ. The final reason single global identifiers can be a bad idea is it makes it difficult to shard -- you can't have each shard adding values independently without some global lock on the main ID.

LJ's posts are identified with primary keys like (userid, user-specific-postid << 8 + post-specific-random-number). The random number helps prevent people from enumerating posts (but perhaps not enough -- you can still tell that you've "missed" someone's post by looking at the visibile number >> 8).

Andy Baio has had the same idea