• Rainbird: The Way Twitter Counts Tweets In Realtime (Which Will Be Open Sourced)

    Friday, February 4th, 2011

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    Yesterday, Twitter analytics lead, Kevin Weil, gave a talk at O’Reilly’s Strata 2011, a conference dedicated to big data. The main topic of the talk was Rainbird, Twitter’s realtime counting system that’s built on top of Cassandra. Notably, it powers a number of things Twitter uses internally, such as Promoted Products analytics, operational monitoring, and even Tweet Button counting.  Today, Twitter has posted the entire presentation to SlideShare, which means we can now embed it above.

    It’s fairly technical, but also pretty easy to follow along with. If you’re at all interested in how Twitter acquires, stores, and uses the massive amount of data they deal with, you should check it out. It also gives a glimpse into their Promoted Tweet analytics package (which looks quite nice).

    Most importantly, you’ll probably want to know about it because Twitter plans to open source it. But first, they have to wait for the version of Cassandra they’re using to be official released, and for some of their own internal stuff to be open sourced. But Weil promises that it will happen.

    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

    Learn more

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA