I agree that Twitter could use some help, but I don't know if opening the source is the main solution. I do believe, a healthy dose of stiff competition encourages innovation. Does Twitter really have a competitor? Wow, that's a new thread in itself. - Bwana ☠

From the page: "Twitter’s major issues come from the backend, or “guts” of the service. If Twitter doesn’t feel that it can open up all of its source code, then perhaps making parts of the code available would be enough to get the help that’s needed. Many developers have suggested that the scalability issues stem from Twitter’s Ruby on Rails code. If this is true, I can understand how a rewrite would be a daunting task, but there are enough open-source coders out there to accomplish the task and do it quite well." - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Perhaps they could just open-source the architecture. Publish a wiki diagram or something that the rest of use could critique/tinker with, etc. I think their problem lies in the architecture, not the code. - Brad McCrorey

Well from what I hear, the architecture is in the process of being changed. Not confirmed at all, but here-say on my part. Hopefully, there's some kind of documentation going on in the process. - Bwana ☠

I'm not sure open source fixes this one either. Some more transparency would be cool, though. It's an opportunity for Some Big Company to come in, throw a little money and a few developers at the problem, and get a lot of good press as a result. If Twitter suddenly went rock-solid stable, and then Microsoft said they had helped re-write in .NET, or Google said it was now hosted on Google App Engine, or Amazon, Apple, Oracle etc. etc. it would be a huge marketing win for that company. - Karim

Bump. Will Open Source save Twitter? - Bwana ☠

I'm not convinced open source is the answer either. Unless they plan on starting from scratch - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I agree that the architecture is the problem. I think they probably are in the process of changing it or else they would hopefully publicly ask for help. I think once the migration process is done there will be few problems. I wish they would post something about what they're doing though. - Brandon Titus

On second thought, I think open-sourcing the architectural plan, not the actual programming, would be a great idea. They shoud take Goldcorp's example and collaborate with the public -- let the users come up with system designs and have Twitter and the Twitter community choose the best plans. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

But it depends on whether they can build the system in parallel or not -- building from scratch might not be an option - Shey, Jamaican of FF

No,. You can architect an open source solution as badly as a proprietary one. And the platform doesn't solve Twitter's business communication problems, which IMHO are worse than their technical problems. - Ontario Emperor