Twitter‘s architectural problems are well known. Many of us in the social networking scene have never been so focused on what’s under the hood of a particular service. While I do have a great deal of performance testing and tuning experience, I have never seen it pushed so hard in the social web.

Not to my surprise, a new Twitter competitor arose recently called Kwippy, and they came out swinging. This blog post by Kwippy highlights their architecture and it focuses on why they will not succumb to fail-whale syndrome:

Today in the world of micro-blogging, problems of twitter have become nearly household news. This has made site developers think about how can they make their site stable and scale with good Quality of service to the user (you , me , everyone). This post is about how we have planned kwippy, the whys and how we ensure that kwippy, the whale does not beach.

Yes, you read that correctly. They referenced the whale. At any rate, Kwippy is a micro/nanoblogging platform which reminds me of Pownce, Jaiku, and Plurk but with minor differences:

• It does not have a (140) character limit
• It does not offer rich media embedding (pictures, video, music)
• It notifies you of new subscriptions via IM
• It does offer commenting on “kwips” that are posted, but users can “subscribe” to these threads giving them a convenient means of “keeping up”.
• It does not have mobile features (SMS, iPhone/mobile/wap webpage)

Some of these differences may not be as bad as they seem. For example, the lack of a character limitation propels Kwippy in the realm of Tumblr and Posterous tumblelogs. Without rich media embeds or text formatting, however, it kind of falls flat on its face. I have submitted feedback to the authors regarding some shortcomings that I’ve seen and they seem very responsive. That’s always a plus. Here’s a walkthrough:

The biggest flaw that I can find with Kwippy is the look and feel of the website. It needs a CSS makeover ASAP. This issue is not a critical one as its in private beta and also a very young application. The look and feel of the website is more easily addressable than say the database architecture. If they address this before going live, I can see this as a decent contender. The feature-set is fairly weak, but with so much focus on a stable architecture, one can’t help but hope for the best for Kwippy. Keep your eye on this one.

You can find me on Kwippy at http://www.kwippy.com/bwana.

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