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The only thing simpler would be sending messages to a centralized queue for people to fetch. Yet Twitter needs 4100 employees for that (though not all engineers I hope).

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Centralized queue and global fan-out makes it only harder to do at scale, not easier. With 1-to-1 messaging, it's trivial to shard the whole system.

http://xkcd.com/1425/

Twitter is not 1-to-1 messaging, generally.

Twitter does IM too: https://about.twitter.com/directmessages

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