[Lagged2Death]

The author has responded[1] to some comments made when this was posted to MetaFilter[2]. He knows about caching, and he has some reasons why caching doesn't help as much as you'd think.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/113541/The-Magic-Dollar-Sign#42233...

[2] http://www.metafilter.com/113541/The-Magic-Dollar-Sign

Google and Yahoo have been preaching for years that even fractions of a second of page load time have a big impact on how likely users are to give up and go somewhere else. Caching doesn't help anyone if the user doesn't come back. It would really be better (for Twitter) to make that first, uncached page load the fastest one of all.

[mhurron]

> Google and Yahoo have been preaching for years that even fractions of a second of page load time have a big impact on how likely users are to give up and go somewhere else

Well of course they worry about it. I can ditch Google and go to Yahoo, DDG, Bing, hell Lycos might still be around, if the Google homepage takes too long to load. Obviously same for Yahoo. Neither of them produce or host the content (search, news) that you're going there for.

That's not quite the same situation as Twitter, GMail, Facebook and whatnot. Where else are you going to go? Your mail is in GMail, or your friends tweet is on Twiter, their wall is on Facebook and they are only there. The "instant load or I'm out of here" doesn't apply so much to them. It really only affects new users who have no other attachment to the service.

I doubt it's much of a problem for Twitter.

[Lagged2Death]

Well of course they worry about it. I can ditch Google and go to Yahoo, DDG, Bing, hell Lycos might still be around, if the Google homepage takes too long to load.

It's been a while since I saw the story about this, but I came away with the impression that users weren't leaving for another search engine; rather, they were deciding that searching (for whatever often-trivial thing) was not an engaging use of their time.

I'd think that would be of especial concern to something like Twitter.

[JumpCrisscross]

You could not use Twitter. I don't think it's as much of a piece of social infrastructure as Gmail or Facebook (at least not yet).

You could also access it via a third-party app, this reducing their monetization options and network visibility.

[ErikRogneby]

I agree.

Especially consider for something like Gmail the incumbent for comparison is MS Outlook. (grab your coffee cup and head for the kitchen...)

2MB ain't what it use to be either.. Folks if you want lightweight sites go mobile: https://mobile.twitter.com/