The Twitter Car Has A Flat Tire and No Jack

Robert Scoble had the chance to sit down and chat with Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone today for a 30 minute interview. During the interview Biz Stone compared the architecture fix for Twitter as repairing a flat tire on a car going 95 mph, which he admits, is frankly “scary”.

But what sort of people attempt to repair a moving vehicle? Daredevils, suicide risks, and morons are the three personalities which come to mind. If your car gets a flat, you don’t keep running at full-speed unless you’re on the run from the cops in a high-speed chase. Evan Williams says that when a car gets a flat at such speeds, you have to lean down on the flat and let the other three wheels do the job.

Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the dare-deviling duo.

When any sensible law-abiding citizen gets a flat tire, they don’t continue speeding along. In fact, most sensible people will come to a complete stop on the side of the road. If Twitter is truly only running on three tires at the moment, is it time to take a pit stop on the shoulder for a tune-up?

When you’re cruising along at speeds of 95 mph, you lose the ability to use essential tools which are needed to keep you running full-steam ahead. There’s no way to jack up the car and slip under the hood as the ground speeds by below. As the metal rim and axle chafe against the hard concrete, there is bound to be even more long-term damage done to the car.

When Twitter disabled IM compatibility and lowered their API down to 30 requests per hour, this was the sign that they are now running on only 3 tires. And anyone who knows anything about cars knows that this is only possible for a short amount of time before the car either catches fire, or brings itself to a screeching, spark spitting halt.

If Social Media Were A Film, Which Stars Would Play The A-List? Part 1

Have you ever wondered what Twitter: The Movie or Digg: The Musical would look like? I’ve been doing some brainstorming and here is some help to the future casting crew of Social Media: The Feature Film!

Philip Seymour Hoffman (known from Capote) as ROBERT SCOBLE

Chris Noth (known from Sex and The City, Law & Order) as JASON CALACANIS

James Franco (known from the Spider-Man films) is KEVIN ROSE

Vin Diesel (known from The Fast and The Furious) is LOIC LE MEUR

Stay tuned for Part 2!

4 Factors That Are Destroying The Twitter Experience

Ya know, I’ve been sort of hard on Twitter. Sure, we can debate about the mistakes they’ve made with their architecture and their public relations until the cows come home, but it all comes down to one thing. We all love Twitter. Unconditionally perhaps.

To be totally frank, the Twitter tech team and corporate ladder are not the people that are destroying the Twitter experience. There are plenty of external reasons for its calamity of late.

1. Twhirl and the Twitter API: Don’t misunderstand. Twhirl is an excellent application. Built on the Adobe AIR platform, it’s sleek, clean, quick, and great for use if you don’t want to drift into the public timeline. But here within is the problem. Power users who use Twhirl exclusively might be missing out on the most important factor of Twitter, the reply.

Because of the 60 API request limits per hour which the Twitter API has users abide by, it seems that Twhirl has led people to post and run, waiting for others to communicate. The problem is that nowadays, a smaller amount of people are actually latching on to the web interface, catching all of the noise that runs by. Users of Twhirl (and I’m only speaking from personal experience) might be missing out on a lot of conversation by sticking totally with the program. The API limit means you’re not refreshing as often as you might like too, and maybe not even checking your friend timeline at all.

2. FriendFeed: FriendFeed takes the linear form of Twitter and makes it non-linear by grouping personal Tweets in groups, rather than in conversational context. Users who are making the switch over to FriendFeed might be missing half of the story and not even know it. And the problem isn’t so much that FriendFeed is bad. It’s that it’s too damn good.

The FriendFeed addiction bug is just as contagious and maybe more so than the Twitter bug. I could compare FriendFeed to super glue. Very sticky, hard to ignore, and even harder to remove from your life once it’s stuck in your psyche. FriendFeed is already resulting in a decrease in noise on Twitter. It’s clear to me. But sometimes you just feel like jumping on Twitter for a linear conversation, but when you get there, you realize the real party has hopped on a different boat.

3. Spammers: Though not nearly as serious of an epidemic as a month ago or so, spammers are still prevalent on the Twitter site. It was unavoidable. A site such as Twitter which serves as a perfect outlet to communicate one message to tons of users at once was the perfect place for the spam horde to congregate.

But it’s quite unnerving to wake up in the morning to find, say, 10 new followers, more than half of which might be spam. And though there is no law restricting you to refollow spammers, there’s no telling when a user is going to break out the feed machine and start chugging out multi-post Last.Fm scrobbles or spammy blog posts.

4. The Twitter Bad-Mouth Brigade: OK, guilty as charged. I was once one of those people who logs on to Twitter, and continues to post only about what Twitter is lacking. But after a while, this mentality is a real downer. For once I would love to log into Twitter and have a conversation about something that isn’t Twitter-centric.

There was a time where Twitter was my secret hideout for talking about the newest and more interesting tech news and conventions, but Twitter is going through that classical critical mass backlash, so FriendFeed has become my new special place. It’s clear that Twitter users love talking about Twitter. And I love it just as much as the next user. But it would just be nice to go there and use it for something other than Twitter bashing or evangelizing.

Google Buys Twitter!

I keed, I keed. But seriously, check out this and this.

How To Be A Tech Evangelist

Wikipedia defines Tech Evangelists as any “person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects.” And of course at very grammatical and technical stand-point, that’s absolutely correct. But what these definitions of evangelism seem to leave out are the qualities that evangelistic people have that helps them spread the gospel of tech better than others.

In my opinion, without an effective use of evangelism, most start-ups will wind up doomed to fail. It’s the passion of unaffiliated users which guides start-up companies into the limelight. Without a flag head to raise the message to the masses, the message is left at half-mast, already prepared for the entrepreneurial death rattle.

So what makes and evangelist an evangelist? The answer is, “not just one factor”. In order to be a successful evangelist, there are key personality traits which one must already posses, as well as other skills which are learned among the way. Social networking is changing the world of evangelism as we know it. Mostly providing an easier outlet to spread the word. But before you can talk to the audience, you actually need an audience. Which brings us to our first key trait.

1. Social savvy: Any master of the art of evangelism knows that without an audience, evangelism isn’t much of a help to anyone but yourself. The spread of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed (which will eventually result in a new breed of evangelism, the PR tech evangelist) have helped make communication of any given subject much easier in the face of the masses. Before the social media explosion, evangelists were limited to writing blogs, speaking at conventions, and pretty much held by the very scary “word of mouth” factor.

If you can understand your audience, you can understand the first step of successful evangelism. Gaining the crowd which will help spread the love. The great thing about social networking is that it allows you to communicate with a broad audience while still being able to converse on a personal basis through direct messaging.

2. Passion: In order to be successful at any evangelism game, you have to have a full-on passion for what you’re talking about. If you’re planning on feigning passion to earn a paycheck, the chances of a successful knowledge spreading campaign diminishes vastly. Believe it or not, enthusiasm is contagious, even on the ole’ Interwebs.

Actually, especially on the ole’ Interwebz. The Internet allows us to show our passion to a much larger audience then ever before. In this day and age, anyone can be an evangelist.

3. Knowledge: One of the most important factors of evangelism is knowing the ins-and-outs of the company or technology you’re evangelizing. Naysayers are sure to bring up certain features of the product which they think are negative. The only way to answer these people are with knowledge of your limited niche. To explain why your passion is so adamant about the technology in question and why it beats the friggen sucks out of the competition.

But more importantly, having knowledge about the future of the tech field is key. Where will this product be in a year, 5 years, and 10 years down the line? How will it improve and expand? How has the company learned from past mistakes and what are they doing at improving the product for the future? Always keep up to date with any changes in features, architecture, corporate disarray, etc and so on.

You don’t always have to agree with every event that goes down in your field of technology. But discussing what changes could be made to improve the current situation is always a plus.

The Twitter Database Replication Whale: A Stroke of Genius

When Twitter took yet another hit today when one of their databases crashed, they knew that some downtime was in short order. In all honesty, Twitter has been doing 100 times better with site management and public relations in recent days. Even the image they’re now using for their maintenance place holder is a real communication method of culture and politics, or at least as cultural and political as social networking can get.

If you don’t take a second glance at the image (and most of us will wind up not doing so), it appears to be simply a fun attempt at a silly image to keep you amused while the site is down. While this was no doubt ultimately the goal, this whale is now burning an image into your head with symbolism, whether you like it or not.

Do you see the little Twitter birds grasping at their net, struggling with all of their might to keep the massive whale from falling into the water? This is where Twitter now stands. At the corner stone of scaling management, we are the whale, and they are the birds, while only a few days ago it seemed as though Twitter were the harpooners.

But will the net hold long enough to get us faithful users ashore? And do we even want to get there? Whales are supposed to be in the water, right? So what’s the deal with that?

Twitter definitly might have us caught in their snares for the time being, but the net’s threads are inevitably weakening. This whale might get loose pretty soon and escape into the massive sea of competition as fast as possible.

Blame Twitter: Why Gillmor Has FriendFeed All Wrong

Steve Gillmor is the grumpy old man of social media, or at least as far as the Twitter vs. FriendFeed debacle is concerned. When Gillmor first started using FriendFeed, he had already made up his mind about the service. Much like the way your Grandmother has already made up her mind that computers are “just another fad”, or that anything that isn’t black and white is a blaspheme of modern media. In a recent post on TechCrunch, Steve Gillmor points the finger (you know which one I mean) at FriendFeed, blaming all of Twitter’s speed woes on the social aggregation service.

Of course Mr. Gillmor is going to think that FriendFeed is nothing more than a middle man for Twitter. Just check out his FriendFeed page for proof of that. The only services he uses on FriendFeed are RSS and of course, Twitter. If you’re only using Twitter as your major aggregation, yeah, of course FriendFeed is going to seem like a Twitter centric service.

Gillmor uses this quote to help prove his point about why Twitter is superior, and why FriendFeed would fail without it:

FriendFeed is Twitter, only slower. Here’s my demo of the difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:

Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

Ten minutes later….

FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

This is total hog-wash. When Twitter is up and running how it should be, at peak speed and condition, FriendFeed streams users tweets almost as fast as Twitter does. The problem here is not with FriendFeed, but with the utter inconsistency of Twitter’s API. You have to remember, anything that streams onto FriendFeed directly from Twitter is exactly proportionate to the actual reliability of Twitter and their API. If a tweet is taking 10 minutes to reach your FriendFeed stream, this is not FriendFeed’s issue. Well, it is. But more specifically it is an issue FOR FriendFeed. Not because of them. This is Twitter’s issue.

Twitter is in the process of developing a web of mistrust around their entire service. Every single third-party which relies on their API to be working full-throttle at all times is directly effected when Twitter decides to take an “unscheduled” down time for hours at a time. It’s no longer effecting only the community, but other businesses. Including FriendFeed.

And even when Twitter is down, FriendFeed is no one ponied stable. In fact, during Twit-Out, multiple users, including myself, used FriendFeed with the Twitter service disabled. And the interesting thing is that FriendFeed was even more effective WITHOUT Twitter enabled. The noise was considerably more manageable, and the interesting-to-non interesting stream ratio was significantly higher.

I mean, let’s be honest with ourselves. A lot of the time, we jut don’t have anything interesting to say. FriendFeed allows us to post about what OTHERS have said, which makes for a much more interesting conversation a lot of the time while also stirring inspiration for personal blog posts. While Twitter serves as a great distraction piece, FriendFeed has inspired ideas more blog post ideas than I’ve ever accumulated from Twitter. And culturally, FriendFeed seems to be much more relevant as a service which can be mainstream in the future.

Twitter Looks To The Future

What may or may not be a direct reaction to Twit-Out, Twitter has been making some great strides today in their communication with the Twitter community in the past 12 hours. Developer Alex Payne wrote a great article concerning the scalability and architecture of Twitter on their official dev blog, while the the service’s official @Twitter page posted a message (their first since February, which happened to be a series of “<3″ symbols sent to Tweeters) offering users to follow their page for “semi-frequent” updates.

It’s great that between their consumption of user-bought pizza and beer (next will surely be a contribution of assorted nuts, maybe even a few leather chairs or stools) that the people over at Twitter HQ are making an effort to communicate with us, but will it last? Making one day of effort is all well and good, and clearly a step-forward to customer satisfaction, but until I see consistency, something Twitter as a whole has failed in proving to just about everyone, I remain skeptical.

Also, if you haven’t heard, Twitter has raised $15 million of additional funds from backer USV and an unidentified lead investor. So no more excuses! This amount quadruples the $5 million of funding they were working with before. We all hope to see this money well spent. At least we know you don’t need to use it for groceries, with the user outpouring of free food.

It’s been made clear by both their performance and their own comments that the issue here is scaling. Twitter was built on a foundation that essentially wasn’t meant to be used how it’s being used. In a way, it seems like Twitter was never taken very seriously by the creators until users started making their way over and proving that their idea had caught on.

So I’m hoping a nice sum of this money goes into the redevelopment of the Twitter platform which has been causing so many issues for their users. Though it is safe to say that Twitter went from looking at the here and now, to worrying about the future almost overnight.

In added news, Twitter co-founder and CPO Evan Williams made a comment on his page which could be taken in a variety ways. How am I taking it? I’m going to say he isn’t a fan of Twit-Out, though of course it could be totally unrelated. Whatever it is that got their asses moving, I’m in full support of it.

FriendFeed Adds “Rooms” For Personal Group Interaction

FriendFeed has come under fire for being too “impersonal” since users can only converse in threaded conversations, rather than directly to one another in the comfort of their own privacy. FriendFeed has just added an awesome new feature which allows uses to form both public and private groups to interact with one another. FriendFeed describes the new ‘Rooms’ as so:

FriendFeed is great for discovering, sharing and discussing content with your friends. But what if you just want to do so with a few select people–like your bridesmaids–or talk about a specific topic, like the Green Bay Packers? Now you can get a room!

A room is like a mini FriendFeed for a particular subject or group of people. You can make a room for your family, your work team, or your knitting club. Everyone in your room can share stuff with each other and leave comments that only other people in your room can see. You decide whether to make your room public, where anyone can join, or private, where you have to invite or approve each member. You can even choose to view everything from your rooms in your feed, instead of just in the rooms themselves.

This is a huge step for FriendFeed, and here’s why.

The service was already awesome, but there was a certain lacking of a personal touch. No direct messages or private threading. FriendFeed Rooms allows the user to interact with only the people they want to interact with, or even create a public theme room for subject specific conversation.

So, what do you think about the new “Rooms” feature? Is is a step forward for FriendFeed?

Create your own room here.

Twit-Out: The Official Soundtrack

After an hour or so of slaving over a hot keyboard, here is the official Soundtrack to Twit-Out for your listening pleasure! This playlist was produced by me and all of the great people over at Friendfeed contributing to the conversation. Give it a listen!