I like the way Twitter gets something done in improving the internet using an open source library. For instance, Bootstrap is all over and did encourage a lot in pushing responsive/mobile websites.
Its a lot better than having your tab page hijacked to show a google search box like in Google chrome a closed box from an open source project - webkit. I hope twitter stays this way 5-10 years from now.
Its also not that widely adopted which is the problem its a great protocol I think. When Google pushes something it doesn't always work so well, besides android, there was also WebM and its picture counterpart which aren't well adopted.
What I mean by this is If I as a developer want to use it in my project its not all that easy. Big sites adopt it but I wish more of the internet would & it would easy to build APIs on it too.
Before bootstrap a whole lot of sites worked on mobile but because of Twitter a significant chunk of new sites became responsive and mobile.
Google uses it for nearly everything.
Facebook supports SPDY.
Twitter supports SPDY.
All CloudFlare sites support SPDY.
nginx supports it.
It's becoming more widely deployed on the large Internet sites that have the capability and engineering resources to make it happen. If you want to deploy it on your own site then nginx makes it easy.
Yes you are right most of the big sites use spdy. The issue I meant to speak of was Its not that easy to use in the 'immediate' type of way.
If I wanted to build a site running on SPDY and have a client side app to communicate to the server its not fully covered.
Nginx wouldn't help to fully enjoy full of the benefits of SPDY because it would just be a transparent proxy back towards http.
For instance I want to connect to my meteor app over DDP using SPDY but Its not possible to do that yet.
When twitter does something like this they try and solve a legitimate issue without having much of an agenda that belongs only to itself. We all could use this.
I agree. Google does great engineering, but their "developer-as-an-end-user" to their engineering really suffers. Take a look at Android documentation vs. iOS documentation if you want an example. I really wish Google would hire some great engineers who actually LOVE technical writing and understand developer experience to create their APIs.
The "picture counterpart" of WebM is called WebP, and it gets about 30% savings over jpeg. While you can't serve it to everyone until all browsers support it, if you'd like to convert images to WebP and serve them only to supporting browsers you could use mod_pagespeed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module
(Disclaimer: I work on mod_pagespeed and ngx_pagespeed at Google.)
Its a lot better than having your tab page hijacked to show a google search box like in Google chrome a closed box from an open source project - webkit. I hope twitter stays this way 5-10 years from now.