HN Explorer

How does Twitter do this?

5 points by aitoehigie ↗ HN
I am just curious, how does twitter send "twitts" to users of the service? Do they have an SMS server farm? i.e. computers attached to GPRS modems connected to the web? or do they just buy sms units from whole sellers? if they do so, it must be pretty expensive and do they make any money at all?. If anyone has any info about the inner workings of Twitter, i will love to have it. thanks

12 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] thread
pmjordan
Given that they have a 250 message/user/week limit (or something like that), it would seem that they're losing money on every message. Given their high volumes, they are probably in a position to negotiate lower pricing with operators, however. Maybe they feed straight into the mobile operators' networks? who knows.
piers
I think the 250 message/user/week limit is only in the UK (someone correct me if I'm wrong) and maybe Europe too.
gaius
One of the interesting things I have learnt working on paging gateways is (in the UK at least) infrastructure is designed for the case in which one station sends many messages to many consumers. If you are a station that receives many messages (of the order of thousands a month) via SMS then you will find yourself running into limitations inside the infrastructure; in that case you can't simply buy a block of a more pages as a sender - you have to wait until the next month when all the counters roll over before that station can receive messages again.
jrockway
Why are you reposting the exact question you posted 2 days ago?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
swombat
So, your approach when you don't get exactly the answers you want is to spam the question again and again until you do?

Get lost. Do your own research.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
swombat
Asking the same question twice in a row from a site like HN is spam, period. Don't want strong words? Don't spam.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
reggplant
They use the API's from a third party gateway such as the ones mentioned in the comments of your other post, its very expensive to run.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)