It’s been only two months since Twitter came public about the volume of the tweets they deliver every day. Back then that number was 50 million tweets a day. Fast forward 8 weeks and that number grew up to 55 million tweets a day. Announced at Chirp, among other things, Twitter growth is phenomenal. That’s why the company is working on moving to its own data center.

55 million tweets a day is like every single Greek tweeting once a day, including the homeless and ones without access to the internet at all. If you were Finn (Finland is the home of Nokia and 39% global market share) you’d have to tweet at least 10 time a day to come up with 55 million tweets a day.

Twitter will grow exponentially along with more capable smartphones hitting the market and services like Google Search enabling access to Twitter’s archive. Add geo location services and the whole mash up idea of everything being connected with everything (Foursquare with Twitter, Facebook with Twitter etc) and you’ll soon be witnessing the real time revolution before the end of 2010.

Twitter (and Facebook later on) will leads to the need of effective, non fault positive filter and algorithmic tools for sorting out noise and the birth of the first software agents living in the cloud and within your pocket.

[photo by Lou O' Bedlam]

There’s a new cool feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site and click on Labs > Site performance. “This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users”. That said what you get is a performance graph overview along with page speed suggestions. This is all nice and cool stuff. I love it.

Using Google’s words, this is an example page from my site and some suggestions on how to optimize it:

Details: Save up to 13.6 KB, 8 requests, 5 DNS lookups and here’s the break down.

Enable gzip compression

Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 13.6 KB:
Go to URL http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13.6 KB)

Seriously, Google wants me to gzip their script on their servers? No, i guess not. I can try fetching the script every few hours and deliver it from my server but will Google like that? Will i get punished or miss a very important update?

Combine external JavaScript

There’s a bunch of Facebook Connect and local .js files. Google’s suggestions are 90% accurate.

Minimize DNS lookups

The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js

http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/swf/XdComm.swf

http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/pestaola.json?

http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?

http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

5 domain lookups in total. 2 looking for Google itself. It’s AdSense and Analytics that my blog is looking a response from. This counts for almost 50 percent of the DNS lookups Google suggests to serve from existing domains. Fetching show_ads.js and ga.js every few hours, deliver them locally and start worrying if i’ll miss an important update or get punished for doing so? Not to mention Facebook.

Combine external CSS

2 CSS files Google suggests to become one. Google is right.

Google’s obsession with speed has just reached a ridiculous point. I’m all down to speed and uber fast loading web pages but the thought of messing with AdSense’s and Analytics’ scripts it’s insane. If Google considers loading time and speed as an extra variable for PR i’m all down to that but first they need to:

1. make sure all their AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts are served from a single domain
2. explain what the complications will be, if any, for fetching-serving locally AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts
3. provide detail guidelines in Google Code like Using Google Public DNS

I’m a speed demon myself but as for now i’m three quarters angel at pestaola.gr

Update: Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet

As of this writing, 83% of all comments or 11,951,185,908 of them are spam according to Akismet, a spam capturing service from Matt Mullenweg and the good fellows at Automattic. Think that for a moment and try to realize the magnitude of almost 12 billion spam messages captured by one and only service, Akismet, in just a small portion of the web. There is spam in email, forums and other sites too, not to mention other tools and services fighting against botnets and zombie computers.

Earth has approximately 6,740,000,000 human inhabitants as of November 2008. Projections indicate that the world’s human population will reach seven billion in 2013 and 9.2 billion in 2050. The analogy is 2 spam messages for every single human being on this planet including newborns, uneducated persons and individuals with no access to the internet. Even if spam disappears from the intertubes tomorrow and man kind makes it to 2050, there will be enough spam to target almost 9 billion minds and souls 40 years from now.

I see no spam anywhere but in places and services where the cost of delivering a message is approaching zero while the targeted audience increases. This is why spam is such a big deal for Twitter but still a moderate pain in the ass for cell phones users.

The years to come are exciting. As spam volume increases, spam will be integrated to human culture in amazing ways. Humans use, build and create with scarce materials such as diamonds or abundant materials such as fabric or, you guessed it, spam. I wouldn’t be surprised if people start creating art from spam or get high because of it. One thing is for sure though and that is, no spam, no life.

[photo via s_fox]