For the last week Twitter has been mostly unusable.  While it's been possible to "tweet" it hasn't been possible to view replies, and now you can't see "older" posts.  While twitter hasn't become a staple in my life yet, I can see with some recent changes in my life me relying on it, or something similar, for communicating with others.  Twitter has proven time and time again that it isn't up to the challenge of being a service that we can rely on for much of anything.  I've given some other services a try to see what might be able to take the place of twitter, and I'm starting to form an opinion on what I think may be our best path forward.

I've developed a 6 step plan for removing twitter from our lives.

Step 1: Sign up for friendfeed, and add all the online services you use to your account
Step 2: Sign up for tumblr (or some other microblogging service) where you can post the things you normally post to twitter.  Another option would be to just use the "share something" feature of friendfeed for what you normally use twitter for.
Step 3: Take advantage of all the other services friendfeed supports and use those services for what they're good at.  For links use delicious or magnolia, for photos use flickr or smugmug, in short use the services that you like the most and use friendfeed as the central hub where you can view everything you and your friends are doing online.   
Step 4: Use friendfeed for viewing your "friends" activity stream, and allow it to become the central place that you communicate with your "friends".
Step 5: If you've become reliant on desktop client for interacting with twitter, download twirl or AlertThingy and set it up with your friendfeed account.
Step 6: Enjoy life without twitter

Sound good?

Well it turns out Twitter just turned off allowing anyone from accessing their site via cross domain requests because of a security hole that was found.  It sounds like they're going to be doing some good things to enable access to their api through cross domain requests but it's going to take a little while.  For the time being I'll probably add a proxy to my own site so I can continue to play around with Silverlight.  It is pretty amazing that literally the day that I try and use Twitter's api via Silverlight they turned off outside access.  For those interested they're going to be doing the following within the next month:

1. Move the Twitter API to api.twitter.com.  Use the completely permissive crossdomain.xml on api.twitter.com.

2. Stop supporting HTTP Basic auth. on api.twitter.com.  Implement OAuth or some other kind of auth. token system.

3. Require non-public API requests to include a valid user auth. token.

All three items were recommended by some chap named Dossy on the Twitter Development Google Talk Group.  On a side note OAuth seems to be gaining some traction and definitely needs some more of my attention.

Tonight I decided that it was time that I checkout the Silverlight 2 beta release.  There are a number of things that I want to try with Silverlight, unfortunately, a bunch of other work has been keeping me.

I decided that the best way to get started would be with a real simple client.  Creating a simple silverlight control for showing recent tweets from Twitter seemed like it would be a fun experiment.  To get started I wanted to download some tweets from Twitter and show them in a ListBox.  Since LINQ to XML can be used with Silverlight 2, I figured the process would be pretty painless.  Of course I forgot about the fact that everyone had to go and try and make everything on the web secure.  From what I can tell, the fact that Twitter doesn't have, or has recently botched, their cross domain policy file is preventing me from being able to make any progress on my little silverlight project. 

Hopefully I'll figure out what the deal is with Twitters cross domain policy file.  It might be that I have something botched since when I run ScottGu's Digg sample I get the same "Download failure" that I get when attempting to download XML from Twitter.

UPDATE: Well it looks like the problem is that Twitter's cross domain policy file only allows *.twitter.com and *.discoveringradiance.com.  That sucks.  I guess accessing the XML directly from Twitter is out of the question.

Over the last week or so I've been following a thread of blog posts that outline some of the issues that Twitter is experiencing.  For those of unfamiliar, Twitter is a "microblogging" site written in Ruby on Rails.  Over the last month or so they've seen some very serious growth.  They're supposedly seeing over 11,000 request/sec which is putting a hurting on their servers.  In this interview, Alex Payne points out some limitations in Rails, most notably it's lack of built in support for talking to multiple databases, that are making it particularly hard for them to handle the increased load.  As a result, several individual have put together plugins to make working with multiple read only slave databases possible.

• Magic Multi-Connections: A “facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time”
• ActsAsReadonlyable

Along with checking out the plugins mentioned above you may want to checkout the following posts that go into more detail on the problems.

• Twitter trouble
• Twitter, Ruby, and Scaling
• Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases

What I find particularly interesting in the series of posts that talk about the scaling problems that Twitter is experiencing is that most of their problems are arising due to the database server getting nailed.  They've been able to scale out their web tier but that doesn't help their poor database server in the least.  I've been thinking about writing a series (or maybe just one) post on some of the things we've been thinking about regarding scaling our application.  It's not written in Rails, and it doesn't need to handle 11,000 req/sec but it does need to handle large sets of data and be "hot ass fast". We're currently positioned well to handle scaling out our services tier quite easily, but we need to do some more work to figure out how best to scale out our data tier.  We've had many discussions about how scaling out our services may not help since it will only increase the pressure on the database server.  Anyway, hopefully I'll get a chance to post more about the things that we're thinking about in a future post.

Jumping back to the Twitter/Rails scaling problems...I'll be interested to see how things end up with Twitter, and Rails.  I have a feeling that Rails will be better off when all is said and done, but will it be because of Twitter, or in spite of it?