Compelling Application of Multicast Building Rss (or twitter) Internet Distributions of Great Expectations....CAMBRIDGE

so twitter - funny app, eh? odd stuff - why would anyone wanna use it, eh?
stalking, really - that's what its really all about.

On the other hand, the s/w "architecture" for twitter sucks bigtime - its kind of like, someone looked at SMS and went, hey, texting is so cool - lets rebuild an accidentally useful thing that is only good on mobile phones before the iPhone because there wasnt a proper keyboard and screen, and lets build it for the internet, eh?
how cool is that, like, er, not?

well anyhow, so noone relies on twitter really - its a 140 byte payload, with a 1-to-many service model, and no especial casual ordering between tweets from different sources. so it is ideally suoted to UDP/IP multicast - scales really nicely from a server perspective - 1 sender with a million followers - indeed, who needs servers - stephen fry could tweet to a billion people direct from his iPhone (assuming the 3G IP service did native multicast...) - indeed, some cellular networks implement broadcast services (for radio and tv channels in Korea and Japan for example) so one could even use the ethernet hack of mapping ip multicast groups to broadcast subnets locally, and get receiver efficiencies as well as sender side scaling improvements from O(n) to O(1)....how about that eh?