Twitter developer announces advanced people search upgrades ahead of SXSW2010

Announcement via Twitter

Alex Payne, a developer @Twitter announced today via tweet that work has been completed on a project to enhance the scalability, resiliency and quality of people search results at Twitter. While the engineer tried to downplay the announcement, the impact could be huge for how people find each other on Twitter. I’m going on a hunch, but I am betting that Twitter made the changes in advance of a looming swarm or location-crazed socialites that will be descnding upon Austin TX in just a few days.

SXSW is coming up. Twitter counting on not going down

Sidestepping all the hype surrounding the upcoming festival, most, if not all the attendees are avid Twitter users following hundreds and thousands of other users. What do twitter users do when they drink? Well, besides have sex? They tweet. And tweet. And look up followers. And tweet. The tweeting alone has been known to bring the service down before (hello @FailWhale!) but what about people search? I asked the developers and engineers and have not had a comment back yet, but I would wager again that if it is a priority at Twitter, it has to do with reliability and uptime. These guys are serious about it now.

Web app scalability experts

If you don’t run in global web domination circles, you’re unaware thatAlex Payne (who also caught some heat for a cryptic tweet that could mean HUGE things for the Twitter.com web interface) is also the author of Programming Scala (O’Reilly):

With this book, you’ll discover why Scala is ideal for highly scalable, component-based applications that support concurrency and distribution.

Six months in the making, the upgrades are all behind the scenes according to Evan Weaver, infrastructure team manager for Twitter:

@joelgibby The changes are all behind the scenes. It’s been like a six-month project, I think. We are very proud.

Alex shared that he had been working with Steve Jenson on the project for some time and that the:

Thing I’ve been working on with @stevej for a while is now out to 100% of users: highly scalable, slightly better quality people search!

He also shared:

Lots of room for improvement in people search quality, but our main goal of making it hella shared/replicated was accomplished with GUSTO.

Indeed.

Social information sharing – better than a press release?

Twitter has been vibing quite hard on it’s own sidechannels with no doubt triple-vetted tweets from developers hinting at upcoming features along with announcements of enhancements to twitter profiles and some new partnerships. This post was different though, because he announced that it is fully rolled out now. Before making his announcement, he retweeted @evan (Evan Weaver, infrastructure team manager @Twitter), who said “scalable people search is scalable.” We sure hope so.

Scaling to keep pace with realtime

Building scalable infrastructure is key in Twitter keeping the talking stick  in the realtime web conversation.  As social sites like Twitter grow by the thousands and millions of users uptime becomes increasingly critical as those users begin to rely on the service for everyday convenience connections like meeting friends for drinks or getting advice on local food carts, or for gathering life-saving information (via Mashable) on friends or family who may be in harm’s way. Remember the June 2009 Iranian Election? The US State Department suggested that Twitter perform routine maintenance such that Twitter would only briefly be down during the middle of the night, Iranian time. This is not just some web2.0 toy or for teens any longer. It’s a core web service, like Google Search, Reddit or Digg. Sidenote: Reddit and Digg have been tremendous community forces of good in their own right, with Reddit and Digg users together raising over $185,000 in 12 hours for Haiti relief efforts.

Dynamic development team

After this post was published, @stevej informs me that only the three mentioned in the post were responsible for the site changes, though “frontend-type folks are ofter working on that page, though.” Thanks, Steve!
I was not able to find out if the only developers responsible were just the three mentioning it on Twitter, but whether 3 or 300, Twitter really has some talented people working for them. Just check out their blogs for evidence. These are some of the brightest folks the web has to offer. As Twitter continues to open up to the web at large with announcements going out via Twitter employees rather than traditional press releases, expect to see excitement about new features and realtime developments in the unfolding Twitter story and its players.

A users-eye view of location and activity in the stream

Location is Big

But it’s only a small part of the larger social landscape. Take a step back and think about what sites like Foursquare and Facebook are asking everyone: Who are you? Where are you? What are you doing? Who are your friends? What do you like? What do you DISLIKE?  (I’m looking at you, Facebook.) Where are you going? What will you be doing? Who do you want to do it with? (You can take that to mean event invitations or something entirely different.) Do you want to see what else is around you? How about a menu? Do you need to do some shopping here today? Here are our specials. Want to pre-order something? Want to see what others thought was worth buying? (Square will be able to use location and purchase history to see hot spots.) No cash? No problem! This location accepts Square payments!  Your friend’s birthday is today and he’s two streets over at the pub with the great New York style pizza for $1.25 and $2.50 pints ’til closing (Captain Ankeney’s in SW Portland). Want to send him a discounted Brightkite / Foursquare birthday pint and a slice? (recipient may claim gift up to 5 days after purchase, must present phone to cashier for redemption)?

…and it’s heating up.

I could tell you that no one knows what’s going to happen at SXSW Interactive this year, but I’d be lying. There will be game-changers erupting from the swarthy loins of sweet, sweet, Austin TX in a little over a week. There’s bound to be a billion startups and more pitching than spring training, but these are products, services and artists that were not born, trained nor tweeted for the first time yesterday. Take for example Brightkite: a global location-based social hub ready for action, with the users to prove it. MG Siegler’s timely article over @TechCrunch has a great rundown of Brightkite. The pure excitement of everything that is coming together right now is overwhelming, and it just keeps heating up. Rather than try to segue cleanly into this next bit I’ll just let you have it:

Action streams may help us share across services.

Adrian Chan is a social interaction designer helping to seed discussions that extend all of these topics into business scenarios that are likely to change the way business is done locally. Remember my scenarios at the top of the article? (think Square) Check out his brief on Action Streams, an evolution of the Activity Streams format . These standalone services are awesome and super-dope. They represent huge steps forward in what is possible even on their own. Start gluing them together and watch the heat build. Stay with me here: Right now, the Action Streams format is a “blue sky” envisioning of the possible requirements, implications and lots more than I can go into detail on, just click through and read Adrian’s brief when you have 2 minutes. Until it’s an agreed standard, or gets adoption, we need something now.

As Twitter web goes, so go the apps.

Twitter has been constantly adding features to their web interface since the service launched. When Twitter.com implements a feature, you can bet that it will be showing up in clients soon (@replies, retweets, lists) but some features remain API-only. Back in August 2009, they first demoed the location API, and it was rapidly adopted by Twitter clients almost across the board. Until Twitter.com adopts location however, the third-party apps are shooting in the dark. A post by one of Twitter’s developers, picked up and run through the rumor mill by MG may hint at what may be coming down the pike (maybe in May?), but until there’s solid word from Twitter or a confirmed source spills, we’re stuck with lone startups and developers doing the best they can to connect us and bring us together in new and exciting ways. I’m not too worried about it. They seem to be doing a pretty good job so far.