During the lunch break at eComm, I sat down with Blaine Cook, the lead architect at micro-blogging site Twitter for a quick chat.

Twitter has now about 6 developers in-house for a service that supposedly serves millions of users worldwide. Although Cook refused to say on how many servers Twitter is currently running he did mention that "until very recently", it was running on just only 30 servers! And that for now, the service is free as well as the API calls.

On the success of Twitter:

"We see Twitter as a new form of communication... rather than being another social network it's more like email, IM or SMS... It's actually a new way to communicate with people... with their friends that are not immediately available and satisfies a lot of informational needs... it also helps coordinate a lot of social activities. So that acted as a catalyst".

Twitter and videos, photos?

"I know people have done that...expose videos and photos inyour Twitter stream. We haven't played with that at all. So I'm not sure that it will happen. So far we are just focusing on text and getting our infrastructure reliable... maybe it will happen, maybe not... a lot of it depends on what mobile technology looks like. Right now the experience of sending photos even in an iPhone is less than ideal. So I think that needs to come together before something on Twitter could leverage that".

But isn't "Text" so last century?

"I think so. We saw a lot of adoption from the API clients. That's huge for us. So a lot of people use API clients on their phones... or API clients on the Web... Those are really interesting. We're really excited of the iPhone SDK, and Android, and so on because it's really opening up what mobile means... There's a lot of problems with the [SMS] technology and if we can move beyond that and have something more flexible that'd be great".

XMPP maybe?

"We send a lot of messages over XMPP. It's an open IM platform. So that means that we can send and receive messages over the network from anywhere. It's low latency. It's a push based technology so we don't have a lot of the technical issues that we deal with [like server overload]. It remains to be seen wether or not it will migrate to mobile. AIM had some success with mobile technologies but I think they maybe try too early... I like it [XMPP] very much as a technology. It gives a real time presence to Web applications".

On Seesmic which likes to portray itself as Twitter with videos

"I worked on Odeo which was a podcasting site and there are some compelling applications of video and audio. I personally never used it [Seesmic] that much and so for me it never quite clicked. But then again, I never used SMS until Twitter came along... but once we have phones that do videos, and send and receive videos and you can just watch it and it streams over the Net, that'll make things more interesting".

Competiton?

"A lot of people talk about Jaiku and Pownce obviously... Jaiku is going down a different path after the acquisition. Pownce is a different application... different targets and this is such a new field and it's much too early to say who's a competitor of who. Fundamentally it's a gigantic space and there's lot of room".

On Twitter vs IM

"Twitter is asynchronous. So I can send a message even when someone isn't online and they'll receive it later".