During the past few months, Twitter has caught on in a big way. The service (which allows people to post short, 140-character updates to their friends and the world) has seen a 131 percent increase in U.S. visitors between February and March, according to ComScore. And today, the company’s CEO, Ev Williams, and movie star Ashton Kutcher will be on Oprah’s show to promote the service. The appearance shows that Twitter has truly gone mainstream, but from a technical standpoint, it will test the small startup’s stability and its implementation of an emerging programming language called Scala.
It’s a well-known fact that anything Oprah endorses turns to gold. Her show has the ability to make best sellers out of books and propel products, diets, and fashions to new heights. So the introduction of Twitter to Oprah’s fans will likely lead to a new explosion of traffic and registration, something that has historically been difficult for the 30-person startup to handle. For the first few years of its life, Twitter’s popularity grew slowly, in fits and starts. During technology conferences in Silicon Valley, for instance, it would crash due to overuse. If a user went to the site during these downtimes, she’d see the now infamous Fail Whale, indicating that the service was over capacity.
Twitter blamed the technical problems on the programming language, called Ruby on Rails, that it initially used to build the service. Over time, it became clear that the language couldn’t allow the site to scale. So Twitter turned to a relatively obscure programming language called Scala that seems to be helping the company grow. In addition, engineers have been breaking up the service into little modules that can crash independently without affecting the entire system (a task that’s produced a few more Fail Whale sightings than usual lately). Cofounder Biz Stone explains in a Q&A with Elise Ackerman of San Jose Mercury News:
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