Mathew Ingram notes the twitter storm around one of Twitter's prominent guys leaving - and notes that a lot of the problem is likely the premature claim that the scaling issues there were a thing of the past:

As support for this argument, Mike uses a presentation that Blaine made at a conference last year, in which he claimed that scaling applications that use Ruby on Rails is “easy” and suggested that Twitter’s problems were mostly behind it. As anyone who has been using the service much over the past year knows, that statement was… well, overly optimistic. Is that Blaine Cook’s fault or is it that Rails doesn’t scale? There’s no question that Twitter usage has skyrocketed over the past six months or so. For his part, Blaine says the departure was amicable and that it was just time for him to move on.

The upshot of this is worth remembering for PR purposes: don't make technical claims that you aren't absolutely certain you can fulfill. I know this one personally; we spoke way too often and way too early about Pollock, and look where that got us.

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