The unsolved scaling challenge
Everyone knows that scaling websites so that they can serve millions of users a day is hard. Most Twitter users have seen the famous Fail Whale often enough, which usually shows up because some component of Twitter's website isn't handling an increase in traffic so well. Many people familiar with web services can also appreciate the additional challenge that comes with providing an API, especially when, as is the case of Twitter, it has to handle 10 times the traffic of the website.
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