A hint in a postscript

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Dare Obasanjo works at Microsoft.  

In his blog post about the Yahoo layoffs, in a postscript, he indicates that Microsoft is interested in creating a Twitter clone.  

I've said openly, on Twitter (and now here) that I would like to be part of a venture that aims to create a scalable Twitter. I've had several conversations with people who are attempting to do this. I haven't done a deal yet. 

My bet: There will be a lot of growth in Twitter in the coming years, and it seems likely that the Twitter company will not be able to scale their systems to meet the demand. There are features that should have been in the product and in the API months ago that are on the back-burner, likely due to Twitter's constant battle to meet meet demand (scaling). 

As a user, I'd like to view the product and the company as a black box, but that's impossible with the system glitches and outages. What users are doing now with Twitter is far more important, imho, than the servers, or the company. The company, understandably, thinks their issues are most important, but that's a matter of perspective. We don't own any stock in the company, so our perspective reflects that. To us, they're a utility. 

All this is a verbose way of saying that Microsoft applying their resources and scaling knowhow to this problem woud be an interesting development.