Have you found yourself waiting in line at a supermarket and the guy in front decides to pay by check? One person can slow everyone down. We had a similar problem at Twitter.

Every server has a fixed number of workers (cashiers) that handle incoming requests. During peak hours, we may get more simultaneous requests than available workers. We respond by putting those requests in a queue.Read more…

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.Read more…

As Director of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.Read more…