When I post something to Twitter, within a couple of minutes it shows up on FriendFeed. I don’t know for sure, but I bet that it’s calling the Twitter API every few minutes to ask if Dave has posted something over there. Most of the time the answer is no. And it’s asking for each of the thousands of FriendFeed users that have connected their Twitter accounts to their FriendFeed accounts. Wouldn’t it be simpler for FriendFeed to say to Twitter: “Here’s a list of all the FriendFeed users who want to have their twits reflected over here.” Then Twitter could call FriendFeed saying “Yo, Dave just updated and here’s what he said.” Don’t call us we’ll call you. It’s often more efficient. ;-> Permalink to this paragraph

Back in 2001, when Amazon needed new ways of accommodating its ever-growing online operation, HP convinced Werner Vogels and crew to buy a mainframe-like system. But then Amazon decided that going forward was a better idea than going backward. After 12 months, the company ditched the hulking box and transformed its site – in Vogels words – “from a single app into a platform.”

This meant adopting a unified model for the literally hundreds of software tools that play into each page of Amazon.com. “We had all these shared pieces of software that needed to work together, and these became bottlenecks. Constructing one piece of shared software that needs to interact with all the others is just a nightmare,” Vogels explained. “So we developed a model where Amazon could be way more agile in terms of being able to build and try out new pieces of software without impacting everyone else.”