When I developed Twe2, here are some of the things I have learnt - 2 minute delay is pretty short - users don't even notice it that much - at one point on Twe2 we changed it to a 15 minute delay an no one really complained. If users are getting pushed notifications they are normally away from a main terminal and thus are not watching twitter through TweetDeck; in short you don't need realtime to be that realtime - Also 99.99% of people don't get that many notifications a day, polling too often is a waste of time. - We supported about 40,000 users off 1 small VPS. - To get DM's you will need to use the users credentials (oauth or otherwise), a 2 minute interval means that you will use 30 of the users requests per hour (this might have changed) and as such they might get annoyed. - 500,000 users is pretty optimistic I wouldn't even worry about that scale just yet, just get your stuff working for now. - User since_id everywhere you can. - We launched with the ability to have quiet periods, that is no notifications while I am sleeping - people will thank you for this.
Based on new developments of Twitter you can use something like follow, shadow and birddog - it offers a migration plan too, start with follow to get all the tweets from a user and to a user (200 users is good to test your API works), then when you launch request twitter to allow you to use shadow (50,000 users is a lot and will probably suit your app for a long time). Then as soon as you see a tweet on the stream you know it is for some of your users and you can fire it straight to them. the only issue is that these API's only get proper replies and not mentions. Currently none of the Streaming API's will help you for DM's (AFAIK). Paul Kinlan, http://www.Twollo.com 2009/8/21 ke...@nibirutech.com <intelligent...@gmail.com> > > Hi > > I am a developer , trying to figure out a way to develop a push > notification solution for iPhone users. > > The easy way to do the push work, is to have a cron-job to check > users' new mentions and DMs. It should work for small number of > users. What if we have a large user base, say , 500, 000 users at > least? How can we use a proper solution to get a 2-minutes delay push > for any user's mentions and DMs? (we can't afford the server cost for > half million requests every 2 minutes) > > I know there are a few Twitter push clients for iPhone , but none of > them can work on a scaled user base, am I right? > > Is there a twitter tech support here? could you please give some > suggestions? >
