An Experimental Twitter Clone with Rails

Let's make an experimental Twitter clone web app by Ruby on Rails version 3.

The minimum features of Twitter clone app are below:

• A visitor can sign up and get an account to become a user
• A user can post tweets
• A visitor and a user can see another user's one single tweet or a sequence of tweets
• A visitor and a user can see public timeline
• A user can follow another user
• A user can see "timeline" of the followings' tweets

I cut the following features for ease:

• A user can see "mentions"
• A user can leave (unfollow) others
• A user can send or receive direct messages

But I also would want to add the following internal feature which the real Twitter seems to be using:

• A timeline is not created just in time, but created when a user of the participants posted a tweet

This feature reduces the load time of reading a timeline.

So what's the difference?

• It doesn't use any special software but just use Rails3
• It doesn't use a relational DB for storing tweets
• It is fast and scales (hopefully)

The Product "twi1"

I named it "twi1" without thinking anything. That's here. http://twi1.heroku.net/

Note that currently it doesn't work because heroku doesn't support writing a file. I should look for another way if I use heroku.

The below screenshots are on my local server.

The public/user timeline is stored as the below.