I am only a recent convert to Twitter, and when I say ‘covert’ I mean ‘I think it’s neat, a little weird, but has some interesting possibilities. Mostly I became interseted in it because it is one of the larger deployments of a Ruby on Rails web app out there; definitely the most high-profile, especially in regards to its reliability (i.e. the frequent downtimes and crashes) and Rails’ ability to scale to the huge demands being made on the Twitter service.
Most of this debate has degenerated down to the level of ‘Rails can’t scale…nuh-uh…ya-huh…nu-huh’. Myself, I firmly believe that Rails can indeed scale quite nicely, thank you, and it is a few high-profile cases (e.g. Twitter) and opinions based solely on experience running Rails apps on a VPS that have perpetuated this myth (and Phusion’s Passenger, or ModRails, may well do much to alleviate these opinions).
So, it was with interest that I read John Gruber’s entry on Daring Fireball pointing to an interview with two of the Twitter guys. They were answering questions posed on the TechCrunch blog about Twitter’s infrstructure, server setup, etc. Also, apparently the Twitter guys must have done many rather unseemly things to the pets of the TechCrunch bloggers, or so it would seem based on the amount of pure bile being spewed at them in the form of questions regarding the ‘damage’ they have perpetrated onto the Twitter community. To their credit, the Twitter guys answered all of the questions with aplomb and dignity. Good for you, guys!
TechCrunch’s response to the answers provided by the Twitter team stated that Twitter continues to be “annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism”. 
