This article was published on September 21, 2010

The new Twitter was developed by 7 core people in 4 months


The new Twitter was developed by 7 core people in 4 months

Twitter today published an in-depth explanation of the technical architecture that the company switched to to build the new Twitter.com that launched last week.

Without getting to into it, Twitter made the shift to a Javascript based site that runs off of the same APIs that its in-house and third-party apps use (again, still no word on why Twitter decided against using its Streaming API).

While the technical info is certainly, well, informative, for us, the most interersting part of the posts comes at the very end, where Twitter says that the app was built over four months by seven core engineers (plus of course everyone else that helped). Now, which four months isn’t specified, but if we work our way back from the launch, that woud set the beginning of the development around mid-May of this year, which was about a month after both Twitter’s Chirp conference and its acquisition of Tweetie.

Twitter also says in the post that it held an “internal summit” about Javascript, and again, it would make sense that this happened sometime before development of the new site (and probably of the official iPad app as well).

All of this leads us to wonder – when exactly was the “ah-hah” moment when Twitter’s management decided to change the course of how the site’s content is consumed on “official” Twitter channels? Was it before Tweetie was acquired? Was it in reaction to something the company learned at Chirp? Or did it come out of a big pow-wow at after the conference?

We’re really asking this mainly out of a sense of technology history and around how ecosystems develop and evolve than from any other reason. Regardless of the exact time of the “ah-hah” moment, if you’ve had a chance to use either the iPad app and/or the new Twitter.com, you’ll probably agree with us when we say that the “ah-hah” has turned into a superior experience.

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