Can anyone explain how does the real time response works in Twitter ? Like when u search in twitter while viewing the result u get real-time updates saying "7 more people tweeted" . I have noticed there is no AJAX call being made. Can someone tell me how this works and is it possible to implement such a thing using PHP ?
Firebug shows that it is making asynchronous calls to the server:
Note the variables:
All it's doing is looking for any matches to the q variable whose ID is greater than since_id and returning a count. If you load the results, by clicking "123 new tweets," the since_id will be updated to reflect the new latest ID value.
It's probably using long polling. See comet.
It's all about comet, as mentioned by Zack. Implementations in PHP are tricky; Facebook uses Erlang.
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