Hueniverse: Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I

Facebook offers an interesting approach to their friends feed which in a way is a very similar challenge. Facebook offers users abstract controls over what kind of content to show and then provides a feed that is an approximation of what the actual accurate aggregated status really is. What this means is that Facebook is showing a timeline that is good enough but not fully reliable and in the context of a friends feed is good enough. The same cannot really apply to Twitter or other messaging platforms where reliable delivery of messages in order is critical. What my friends are generally up to can be generally accurate.