The Twitter service is great. I’m using it to write a novella about “Heidi” where each “chapter” must be 140 characters or less. Feel free to follow along at http://twitter.com/davidpaulyoung. Here’s what you’ve missed so far (by twit-chapter, from the earliest down to the most recent):
The hot sun beat down on the snow drawing water deep into the hidden steams of the mountains. Heidi smiled. These waters would waken the seeds of the grasses and flowers she would use in her May crown.
Heidi walked along the path beside the graves of her parents. She never knew them since they had died when she was only an infant.
Heidi wondered where her next meal would come from. She adored chanterelle mushrooms, but had to make do with portabella.
Heidi surveyed the room filled with debutantes. She wanted to make friends, but she didn’t have the money for the proper frock.
Confronted with the bankruptcy of her dreams, Heidi set off into the mountains in search of her uncle Tomas von Neureuch.
As she approached the stately alpine retreat of her uncle Tomas von Neureuch, Heidi searched her mind for just the right words of appeal.
The door to her uncle’s house was the sort that at the same time kept visitors out, and secrets within from escaping. Heidi hesitated.
Ushered by the butler into the solarium, the table of fresh bread and marmalades put Heidi at ease. She accepted the offer of a cup of tea.
20 Comments
I did kind of the same thing a couple years ago with the Windows “Marquee” screensaver, which had a limit of 256 characters, and it turned into this . It was funny catching people reading them when I wasn’t at my desk.
It’s kind of neat how having a hard character limit helps your writing.
I’m finding that the 140-character limit is helping me over 2-1/2 years of being unable to write. Well, except for 1,300 TextDrive forum posts
But that constraint really does seem to make the act of writing so much easier. Also, drawing from Tantek’s article that Gruber linked to, Twitter removes almost every obstacle to writing by virtue of having only a text field and a submit button. You don’t have to think of a title or subject, create a new message or document, etc. Twitter is close to the kind of tumblelog software that I have wanted for my own sites for some time.
BTW, is it you or Jason or both posting as joyent?
Great idea. Now, let’s get those page loads under 20 seconds, I’ll start following it
Page loads vary from near instant to a minute. There must be a periodic unbunching of underwear required.
Romance novel…..
I know this is a little off topic, though I’m asking b/c of my enthusiasm for Accelerators now offered at $45/mo.
How many (maximum) clients will be on one single Accerelator box?
I noticed that the “Small (S)” Accerelator is 1/64 usage of the box. Does this imply that at most, 64 different people will be hosted on the same box?
Kyle wrote:> let’s get those page loads under 20> seconds, I’ll start following it
yes, this is pretty important. it took http://twitter.com/davidpaulyoung 50 seconds to load.
ideally you’ll only be waiting a couple of seconds max to read a couple of words. it’s one thing to wait 50 seconds to receive the text of a long essay. waiting 50 seconds to read a couple of words will hinder twitter significantly.
this is a good example of how a type of network service requires a particular network responsiveness to even exist. just like how voip can’t exist within the bounds that email can.
@David M. Besonen
You had me curious, so I went to http://twitter.com/davidpaulyoung – and yep, it look nearly 40 seconds for the 1 line page to load.
I am in need of an Accelerator type of service, though I am concerned to sign-up after seeing how slow and unresponsive Twitter can be (especially since Joyent keeps promoting them).
I know this might not be more the fault of Twitter than Joyent, though seeing there consist problems deters me from signing up for an Accerelator service.
Am I alone on this?
I’m comparing the Accelerator option to Amazon’s EC2 because soon I’ll need this type of service for my web application.
Accelerator “M”—————————-Price: $75/moRAM: 512 MBDisk: 5GBCPU: 1/32 of a AMD Opteron
Amazon EC2—————————-Price: $72/moRAM: 1792 MB (1.75 GB)Disk: 160GBCPU: Full use of 1.7Ghz x86 processor
I would really like to use Accelerators because running Solaris would be good but the difference in price/performance is huge in the favor of Amazon.
Really, 1/32 of a processor. That’s craziness. I know and understand that these are powerful machines but it just doesn’t seem like it’s the same pure power of having a full 1.7GHz processor. I can’t imagine what using the Accelerator (S) would be like with only 1/64 of a processor and only 256 MB of RAM. With 256 MB of RAM I’m not even sure if running MySQL/Postgres and Lighttpd would even be stable on the same instance.
If Joyent offerd more RAM and disk I’ll then consider Accelerators but at this time – its still just too expensive for what you get.
Guys, you really need to work with Twitter to get their site more responsive. It’s extremely slow (e.g. nearly 1 minute to load a page).
For a company you promote so much, it’s in your best interest to help them.
Also – Wayne, interesting point. I have to agree that the Small and Medium plans don’t provide much … even for their price.
Ok, I clicked over to your site – the first Twitter thing I’ve looked at – and after waiting for it to load, I find that your requiring me to register to be your friend to read it? Sorry, I guess I’m getting old, but just because 18,000 people say it is cool doesn’t mean I’ll actually sign up.
@Wayne: Here’s a nice review of Accelerators from a customer.
The salient point is that Accelerators aren’t just CPUs and RAM but a fabric of components, including routing/switches, load-balancers, great backbones. Amazon doesn’t disclose what it’s stack is.
@Hank: they’re growing 20% each week. We are helping them. Details to come.
David
Since Big-IP load balancing is not available on the Small (S) and Medium (M) Accelerators, what kind of customer do you envision using those services? (Especially since the RAM and CPU usage is extremely limited)
Do you envision people running web-server + database on a single Small or Medium account?
I have to agree with the others, 1/64 or 1/32 with only 256 MB of RAM extremely limits what you can do even if the network and infrastructure “fabric”, as you put it, is great.
@Greg: CPU is still burstable, for the S and M tiers. These tiers are perfect for doing development and design of a real web application that will have real users. While the S tier is, well, “small”, it is enough to run a full Rails stack. The M tier has twice the amount of RAM and CPU.
David
It’s good to know that the S and M tiers are burstable.
You might want to update the pricing page to reflect that, since currently it doesn’t appear from the table comparison that S & M are burstable (only L – XXL appear to be)
http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/pricing/
Hi Shawn,
We updated the Accelerator pricing page to reflect the burtsability of the S&M tiers (I just love saying that…).
Thank you for pointing it out.
Kristie
Glad I could help. By the way, the table format is much easier to read than the previous version … thanks for the updates.
@wayne, remember that 160GB of “disk” isn’t persistent storage. So how comfortable are you filling that up and then having to shuttle it off, even to S3 that would something that you’d account for. So I’d argue that 160GB doesn’t matter, it could say 1GB or 1TB, because if the instant goes “poof” then it’s gone.
While we put things in “bundles”, the underlying pricing is still a utility. What do I mean by that? I mean that 1GB of space in the bundle is that same price as additional space, and 1GB of space will cost the same whether you purchase it beforehand or after you went over space.
And finally, why bundles with utility pricing underneath, because many customers want to (or have to ) issue a PO, get an invoice, and put a regular pricing schedule in their budgets.