CareerCup

I think this is a question about data structure and OOP design..

Each tweet would be a tree node, with an original tweet being the root.

Each node contains a tweet object, which holds list value of favorites, a formatted string, a bitmap image, and a list of people in the conversation ("@person 1", "@person 2") and the child nodes may be retweets (which are also tree nodes).

Then we may have a linked list of tweets, which is the replies (conversation)

All tweets, retweets, and replies are tweet objects which is all in a giant map that has the tweet ID as a key and tweet object as value..

I don't use twitter so these are just ideas out of my brain :)

I'm sure there are different structures, such as an abstract tweet object with child classes such as retweet, reply, and root tweet, which holds different properties.

I guess it all comes down to what you personally think is the best structure.

This is a system design question. highscalability. com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-twitter-uses-to-deal-with-150m-active-users.html is the best resource.

Instead of using the top n tweets (example 10 tweets, i mean page wise show)
selection will be based on tweet_ID. so if 2 new tweets comes the tweets will be retrieve from the last tweet_Id till the current tweet_Id.
Similar case comes in case of previous tweet.