You’re all awesome! Thanks for making WWDC 2010 a blast!
Twitter vs. Facebook (a developer perspective)
A week or so after Boxcar launched, Twitter reached out. Made a few suggestions. A few weeks later, they reached out again. We’ve chatted on the phone. I’ve visited the new headquarters (it was a blast)!
How many times has Facebook reached out? Zero.
Pretty much the most awesome Pacino speech ever. Just happened to catch this on TV about 5 minutes ago and realized how well I remembered it. I could almost say it word for word, like a scene out of Boiler Room.
Inches. That really is what it’s about sometimes.
two things about boxcar 3.0
- I’m fearful yet excited about this release. It has at least one major change.
- I actually use certain features more now than I ever did before.
Those are both very, very good things.
Let’s get real, real-time should be real-time
Real-time delivery of data: you know it when you see it. You know it when you’re not seeing it.
Twitter’s streaming API is real-time. Boxcar receives your tweets within 1 second or less of you posting them. We then inject those into our own stream and 300 milliseconds later they are sent to Apple for delivery. You receive tweets in your hand roughly 6 seconds after they’ve been posted. The majority of that time is spent in Apple’s data center.
You play real-time games on your PS3 and Xbox, and you’ve done it for years now. The web is just now catching up. With games, even a second of lag is extremely noticeable. So why are some people getting away with calling real-time delivery 15 minutes or an hour?
Real-time is not 15 minutes. It’s not 5 minutes. It’s sure not 1 hour. Stop calling your stuff real-time unless you’re pushing it down pipes within a second of it happening. And you’d better be presenting it to the user within 10 seconds of the event happening.
Real-time is getting the data in the subscribers hands as fast as fucking possible. If you’re not doing that, you’re not delivering real-time data. Period.





