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Twitter is moving to its own data center, showing that sometimes the cloud is not ideal for the real-time web. This may seem ironic as cloud computing is largely credited for giving application developers access to commoditized server networks that they can scale up or down. Cloud services make it realistic for developers to create real-time services in the marketplace. Sponsor But at some point, the cloud is not ideal for a real-time web service provider. Twitter is a good example. And, so, we use this news to present our weekly poll: "Is the Cloud Suitable For Scaling Real-Time Applications?" Is the Cloud Suitable For Scaling Real-Time Applications? online survey According to Data Center Knowledge , Twitter now uses a managed hosting service from NTT America where it has a dedicated space. Twitter also uses Amazon Web Services to serve images, including profile pictures. Twitter parted ways with Joyent in January 2008. The move NTT America came in response to latency issues. Latency is not a major issue for small application developers that use a service like Rackspace or Amazon. But when a service scales, the issues become increasingly significant. John Adams of Twitter discussed scaling issues last week at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference. Chirp 2010: Scaling Twitter Latency issues pose a significant challenge to cloud computing services that serve real-time applications. It raises questions about how a service can scale in a cloud computing environment. In Twitter's case, the cloud did not do the job. Will the problem get worse? Raghavan "Rags" Srinivas thinks it could: "One of these fallacies is that "Latency is zero". In traditional computing, the compute and data was typically hosted on the same system and the data latency was determined by the storage disks and the data bus speeds. It was a simple matter of buying better hardware to overcome data latency if it was ever an issue. In cloud computing and especially when we get to network of clouds with data expected to flow around different clouds, latency (however minimal it is) could be an issue depending on the data being manipulated, the network speeds and so on. Add to this the fact that the entire data or part of the data should be encrypted and decrypted when it moves around unreliable and public networks, and the fact that data needs to be streamed, latency will soon add up and could become a serious issue." What do you think? Will latency emerge as one of the major issues for cloud computing service providers? Discuss

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Is the Cloud Suitable for Scaling Real-Time Applications?

Think a tweet is just 140 characters of text? Think again. To developers building tools on top of the Twitter platform, they know tweets contain far more information than just whatever brief, passing thought you felt the urge to share your friends via the microblogging network. A tweet is filled with metadata - information about when it was sent, by who, using what Twitter application and so on. Now, thanks to Raffi Krikorian, a developer on Twitter's API/Platform team, you can see what a tweet looks like , in all its data-rich detail. Sponsor Via a weekend post on Krikorian's blog, there comes an embedded document that shows what a mapped out tweet looks like. He says he decided to do this map using "JSON as opposed to XML" since the company is "considering not supporting XML on v2 of the API." That may mean nothing to everyday Twitter users, but it's important information for developers to take note of. Coming Soon: Lots More Data This image is all the more interesting when you consider how much richer a tweet's data map will soon become. At last week's first-ever official Twitter developers' conference, Chirp , Twitter announced that it will implement a new feature called "annotations" next quarter. This was possibly one of the most significant announcements made, second-only (if even) to the launch of Twitter's advertising initiatives , the long-anticipated answer as to how Twitter plans to make money. With annotations, third-party Twitter developers can add any additional metadata to a Twitter post. That's right, any data. And a tweet can have more than one annotation attached to it. This extra data will initially start off small - Twitter developer Marcel Molina said it will "probably" be around 512 bytes. But over time, it will gradually grow larger as Twitter rolls out the feature and scales up in order to support it. The company hopes to have it end up "around 2K," says Molina. How developers use that extra space is entirely up to them - there can be one giant piece of extra data attached to a tweet or a thousand tiny ones. With annotations, Twitter could become a platform for sharing anything, not just 140 characters of text. What will developers do with that data? We can only imagine. Perhaps new apps will allow users to share media like photos, videos and music? Or they'll add more details about a tweeted link? Will you tag your tweets? Share vCards? Create polls? These sorts of innovations will launch shortly and we expect to be surprised and delighted by what the developers come up with. At some point, the map of a tweet posted by Krikorian will resemble a primitive artifact from a bygone era. We'll probably look back at it with wonder as we contemplate how far we've come. As for now, let's take a moment to enjoy Twitter's simplicity before it becomes a mishmash of other media and data. Discuss

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This is What a Tweet Looks Like

Our number one post this week was that Twitter's archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There's got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you'll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter's past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more. Sponsor Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com . Mobile Web Where Does Android Register on Google's "Evil" Meter? Opera Takes a Back Seat to Safari on the iPhone Microsoft's New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Internet of Things 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers Mary Meeker's Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Weekly Poll: What does Virtualization as a Service Really Mean? Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software Another Cloud Computing Acronym To Drive You Bonkers Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More...

How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That's part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers. This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API's for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers. Sponsor Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet. To manage API's, Sonoa offers Apigee , a free self-service for developers working with API's. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools. For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time. The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning. API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate. [Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.] Discuss

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Sonoa Broadens Twitter API Management Service

After a busy couple of days, oneforty app store founder Laura Fitton is in the unique position as the unofficial spokesperson for a developer community turned upside down in the wake of the Tweetie acquisition and Promoted Tweets launch. As the company hosts its first Chirp developer conference, thousands of coders are questioning their role and ability to monetize on the microblogging platform. Always an optimist, Fitton and oneforty are intent on collecting and answering the many questions plaguing developers. Sponsor The Tweetie acquisition in particular has sparked wild speculation from the blogosphere. For the first time since Twitter chose Bit.ly as its official link shortener , developers are reminded of the sobering fact that building on a single ecosystem can prove shortsighted. When asked how third party application developers can mitigate the risk of being cannibalized, Fitton agrees that integrating applications into the broader real-time web (not just Twitter) is always a good idea. While she acknowledges her own product is marketed as a Twitter app store, a number of the featured services integrate with other platforms. We asked Fitton how her community's developers are responding. She answered, "Tensions always exist between platforms and the companies that build on them. Entrepreneurs have to realize that and be ready to pivot in the face of competitive forces they cannot master. But really, in what industry do startups NOT face competitive forces they cannot master?" She makes the point that Twitter web clients have been competing with the Twitter.com browser client interface for almost as long as the community has existed. Says Fitton, "It hasn't been within Twitter's core competency to utterly master the user experience, so the competition there might not be as one-sided as everyone thinks. The company has to realize that a diverse ecosystem is going to remain critically important to their growth. If a client monoculture forms and diverse use cases/engagement styles are not well served, user uptake and retention will eventually slow." That being said, if Twitter does choose to acquire more application services, Fitton's recently launched Twitter Toolkits suddenly become even more useful than their initial consumer benefit statement. Fitton's toolkits feature curated Twitter application lists from high profile tastemakers like Guy Kawasaki , Brian Solis and Steven Rubel . With web celebrities openly endorsing their favorite apps, Twitter and other potential investors get a glimpse of what lies beyond download and usage numbers. Investors see which applications have elite web celebrity advocates - these applications then more attractive for acquisition. Acquisition candidate or not, ReadWriteWeb's own Audrey Watters' wrote a fantastic article to help you assuage any fears you might have as a developer. As for Fitton, she's already met with a group of 27 top third party application developers and carried the group's concerns to Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver. In the future she plans on expanding this group and formalizing the process in which oneforty carries developer needs to platform executives. If you're a developer and you've got Twitter-related questions or comments, you can reach Laura Fitton by tweeting @pistachio with a brief note and link to any relevant blog posts or material. Photo Credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - TheLetterTwo.com Discuss

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Inside Twitter's Developer Fears with OneForty's Laura Fitton