Testing With Twitter; The Importance of "Real" Applications

We have talked here about the overall importance of testing…particularly the need to test with REAL application traffic, live security strikes and doing it all at speeds of 10Gps and faster. These days that first criterion, testing with real apps, is getting more and more important. A great example comes from many of the applications popping up, seemingly every day, in the ‘social networking’ and Web 2.0 space.

Twitter is one of those social networking apps that emerged seemingly overnight and rapidly became a social phenomenon. It transcends description but has caught fire and become so mainstream, so fast, it is now regularly mentioned on CNN, USA Today and even CSI (Miami, of course). This exposure, and the applications usefulness, has created enormous growth. Depending on who you talk with there are an estimated 340,000 public Twitter accounts with 60,000 new accounts starting each month, or potentially 2.2M Twitter users (as of July 22^nd). Twitter has also seen great usage as a customer service tool, a social network and a lifesaver. 

With great success comes great disappointment and scrutiny of course, and Twitter has been getting plenty of poor coverage because of their inability to keep their network functioning at peak performance. It’s a worry of every company, from Fortune 500 to a start-up…if you provide a service that relies on a network, you best know that the components of that network can handle all the application traffic, security strikes and do it with blazing fast speeds.  We take this to heart and have actually added Twitter to the real applications folks can now perform protocol testing using BreakingPoint (check out our TweetLease).

Folks like Biz Stone at Twitter and other business heads (I’m talking to you Mr. Zuckerberg) must push their network equipment manufacturers to make sure they are properly testing network devices for today’s sophisticated application usage.  Twitter is simply one example of apps that can affect your network performance, but it is something that was not tested on your network devices before they were deployed. Tomorrow there will be more and you need to make sure these are being used to test your equipment.

Of course, this topic brings us into the ‘architecture discussion’ and how it is crucial that your testing tool is being updated with realistic blended apps and security strikes on a regular basis, and by “regular basis” I don’t mean every three months.  There is no telling where the next heavy use application traffic will come from but let’s just say my money is on Plurk…just because I love the name.