If you’ve been a user of FriendFeed for the past few months, you’ve probably noticed how slow the importing of tweets has been. But something changed a couple days ago — tweets started showing up almost instaneously in feeds, after they were posted on Twitter. That’s because FriendFeed is testing a new type of backend feed that Twitter is developing.
This new feed is interesting because up until now, FriendFeed has been one of the few services with access to Twitter’s XMPP feed. Some have called the XMPP feed the “fire hose,” because it sends out a massive amount of data quickly, as opposed to importing a feed by way of RSS, which is limited and slow. But XMPP has been anything but fast these past few months, so a new solution was needed.
This new feed is still experimental, but here’s what we know: It’s HTTP-based, and, at least for FriendFeed, it will replace the XMPP feed. Twitter is using FriendFeed as a testing ground for it, but eventually, if it works, it should be opened to other services. “Hopefully we can identify what works and what doesn’t. Whatever we determine from this test, will inform how we move forward,” Twitter’s Jason Goldman tells me.
And it has been a bit glitchy so far. When FriendFeed first implemented it on Wednesday, it was nearly instaneous — FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit sent out a tweet and one second later it was on FriendFeed. But in subsequent days, the feed slowed down quite a bit, sometimes taking as much as 20 minutes for a tweet to come though. It was a bug that Twitter believes it has fixed, according to Buchheit.
Twitter is an important part of FriendFeed, as tweets make up a high percentage of content on the site. Of course, Twitter is becoming an important part of a lot of services, so hopefully this HTTP-based feed will one day mean near-instantaneous tweet access for all.
[photo: flickr/uwe hermann]
Yay another Twitter article. FU TC
Why so bitter ‘Igor’?! Twitter is the biggest thing going right now. Period. And I’d say this article is of great interest to developers and tech startups. Architecture and scalability are major issues that we all need to be cognizant of.
Moron Todd. Just because everybody hyped AIG doesnt mean it was the biggest thing going on. Same with Twitter. TC is getting on my nerves. Can you guys please f* lay off twitter and discuss something else? I mean the NYT writes about Twitter now, so you have done your bit.
http://www.tech...tinue-to-do-so/
hahaha Monsoon you are 1,000% right!! Maybe Tood had some Leehman Brothers shares as well…
HAHAHA!!
FriendFeed will never go mainstream, but considering their ability to develop and implement features, they have a potential of become the universal think/test tank for early adopters and 3rd party APIs.
myspace should do this
@saysmeteam
This is awesome
I don’t understand why people are so bothered about gathering tweets in one place and watch them as they flow. I bet most of those tweets will be useless. Instead, one would be interested in gathering popular webpages that are shared among people in Twitter. And that’ll be very useful, I guess http://www.boilingpage.com is the only company that I know that does this job perfectly. It shows the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter. On top of that, it has a real-time web page search engine. This can be the next Google in search. It has potential, definitely. Try it out, here’s a sample when I searched for “Obama”, it shows the recent popular pages related to Obama:
http://boilingp...hp?search=obama
It’s fast. Instant is more like it! It’s definitely a welcomed improvement!
Yeah, loving the speed.
Probably this is their Scala-based architecture. I really don’t understand what’s wrong with Twitter and always going after exotic technologies. At the end, they have one of the simplest services around (from functionality point of view) and their only real task is to make it scale, which may seem hard (given their technology choices), but isn’t really given their still relatively small user base.
BTW I really love the new url shorten link at the bottom of all of your posts, very handy!
Thx. We agree!
Seems like I am going mainstream
Seems like nice technology. Do anyone know how it works technically? Does it do notification or something. It must’ve.
Yes, they are doing it with tubes. And they have a notification for you, “go back to sleep”.
http://apiwiki....I-Documentation
I am in the same boat with max levchin. I am tired of this friend feed crap. where is the real innovation?
Uh, old news. this was announced months ago.
No, I can assure you, it wasn’t. You might be thinking of SUP, which is different.
Twitter and Friendfeed
Collaborate on Firehose
Higher speed tweet feed
Haiku?
Haiku
I kind of like it