Twitter blames its users

I’m getting tired of the Scoble and Arrington “it’s all about me” show.

Gentlemen, your egos, and self centered delusions that you are the center of the universe, are getting old fast.

Scoble, remind me again how much Twitter charges to use their service?

As for the phone analogy mentioned earlier, you mean to tell me you’ve never heard an “all circuits are busy now” message when making a phone call? Sounds like a scalability issue to me.

It’s a weird feeling, Robert. According to Dave Winer’s tool, I’m #2 in spewage. In my case, it’s volume more than users, but the equation puts me up there. Since seeing that, I slowed down for a bit, then got back into it, as that’s what it’s there for. And you’re right. Do I want to feel like Twitter’s upset that I’m using it? Probably not.

I agree with your point of view on this.

Nice cartoon.

Anyway, let’s see how Friendfeed will scale when more user will join.

This is such a publicity stunt by Scoble. Worst than British tabloids, creating stuff outta nowhere.

I find it interesting that those condemning Robert for posting this don’t really fall in the category “popular user” – I saw more than one “popular user” limiting their tweeting after reading what Alex posted and wasn’t that surprised after reading that paragraph.

Notice that there wasn’t a line pointed out – what is ‘popular’ in this context – 100+ follower/ings? 1000+? 10k+? How frequent is ‘too frequent’? 3 tweets a day? and hour? 30?
The finger pointing was there – no matter how much I want to defend Twitter because I really want to see them succeed.

There was a brief reference at the end about script adders – but why not blame those folks from the get-go? Why not say “those accounts mass adding/following”? Because we know who someone is referring to by the word “popular”, don’t we?

The only reason I didn’t make Dave Winer’s “spewage” list is because he’s never followed me (which is perfectly normal) but the %-following math has me right up there, thanks.
So I’m one of the reasons Twitter is having issues? I think not. Long before I had even 1 follower there were folks with 10k plus updates, thousands of followers and “popularity” – so if that was the issue, it should’ve been addressed last year some time… But it wasn’t.

Look, let’s be serious here for a minute. Twitter has had stability issues for a long time. They seemed to remedy a LOT of them around early February this year in time for SXSW. Then right about the time Blain leaves, we start seeing more and more issues. I’m not buying it. Suck it up Twitter and admit that the problem isn’t coming from the outside, it’s internal.

Robert,
I am a fan of yours but surprised by this post.
I’ve been watching your interview with Biz and Ev and you are laughing and giggling. No critical questions, just laughing your nerves away.
And now with your computer at hand and no ‘real’ persons you start criticising on harsh way .
Be brave! Say those things interviewing !

yea, at the risk of piling on, that was pretty weak of twitter…..blame users that contributed to its success. Even if true, there were so many better ways to handle this such as asking these highly active users to be an advocate for the solution.

Hopefully, Twitter will acquire some matured management to guide in issues such as this.

- scott -

So what the heck are they going to do with the $15 million?? They could scrap the whole thing and start over and development wouldn’t cost a fraction of that.

How much are they paying for bandwidth? Anybody have a clue?

Sheesh. If I were in Twitter management, the first thing I would do is turn off Scoble’s account. He’s not helping me one bit. And, I’m not making any revenue from him. So, he’s more trouble than he’s worth. If it is the “high profile users” causing the issues, then I’d turn off their accounts and see if that stablizes things, then work to figure out what the source of the problem is and fix it. I’d be fine with taking the PR hit. My guess is a relatively small percentage of my Twitter users even know who Scoble, Winer, and Arrington are. So….buh-bye. They cause me more costs than benefits at this point. And I can do this without telling them, or giving them a reason…according to the TOS.

Or, hell, I might just shut the whole thing down. Again, the TOS says I can do that.

Kawika,
I read your post regarding how to better organize your comments threads.
I am curious to know why you think cocomment is not satisfying your needs.
We show them in order of appearance with a drop down list per comment.
I am curious to know what your needs are.
You can reach me at joaquin at cocomment.com
Tks
J

Not sure they’re blaming their users in as much as their application’s usage. We all know how difficult it is to turn back the time on an established product – I hope Twitter is up for it and can use the $15 mil wisely. The largest hurdle is to try to not impact their users while they make the necessary development, architecture and infrastructure changes. The consequence, of course, is that this is a fickle Web 2.0 crowd that will drop them at a moment’s notice for the next app in line. I understand each side’s argument in this situation and empathize as the Director of Technology who adopted an app that’s growing 100% per quarter. ‘Do overs’ aren’t in the option booklet!

there is a larger question of a popular “FREE” service being available 24×7.. what shud be the expectation from them? Zilch or full availability? what if gmail or live mail went down for the period that twitter has been? what happens then?
http://www.abhishekkant.net/2008/05/eggs-in-basket-lessons-on-reliance.html

In other news, Twitter* reveals that they go down when there is too much database usage. Robert Scoble offended.

Seriously, they’ve previously stated that they designed twitter badly and are trying to fix it. Nobody is getting blamed, they’re just saying that their system does note scale well and the database is getting way too many unnecessary calls because of it. (And hint that heavy users are generating many of them. You know it’s true, man. )As a fellow programmer, I can sympathize that it’s not the easiest or quickest thing in the world to fix broken architecture.

Anyway. Anyone else noticed that they have a new status screen for over capacity? Hilarious image.
http://static.twitter.com/images/whale.png

robert, can you please try to be less self-absorbed?
it is beyond me why you are so popular.

so you are offended and feel that it was insinuated by twitter that the big scoble is solely to blame. you take the venture beat post as an excuse to unleash your anger towards twitter when they are admitting plainly that their service is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
they are not making excuses that are bullshit. they are pointing out several causes of problems… one of which has to do with the way popular (nothing to do with best, btw) users are handled… in all aspects. it is a known fact now that active users with many followers require intense processing. this in conjunction with other issues such as 3rd party services, IM messaging and an overall limited info architecture that was admittedly not conceived to be what twitter has become. this has all been stated clearly by twitter and others…. you even.

i commented on dave winer and om malik’s blog recently about this topic and expressed that if i were one of these resource intensive users… i would voluntarily take some measures to ease things for twitter…. whether or not they needed or wanted such action by a user of their service…. just because i think they deserve that kind of support from the community who has used the hell out of their service for the past 12-18 months.
they are in a unique position. it seems right to support them as the leading company in the micro-messaging space. because like it or not, a user like you is almost like a dos attack on twitter at this point. and if i was a very active popular user, i would chill out and offer to do whatever to ease the burden until they are able to sort through the priority issues of fixing and re-archtecting components so that twitter can be what it has evolved to be.

you make alot of comparisons to other technologies and services when trying to make a case that twitter sucks. but i dont think any of those points have merit… and most are moot. you can praise friendfeed all day long but it’s not a fair comparison. and your other comparisons show your lack of technical understandings on the depths of system architecture. you are tech buzz guy…. one that swims in the surface area…. one that gets drunk on the hype. if you truly understood how all the related tech works… you would not be so hasty with your comments and big attitude. but it must be tough to tame that ego with all those very close friends following your digital ways.

get over yourself. i sense that significant others are getting over you by now. i bet a good portion of your “friends” are just in it for the humor and entertainment and mockery aspect. because you dont have much to offer when it comes down to it. you just happen to be popular. and popular is never exclusive to the “best”. look around and you will see that to be true… very true.

cheers.

sull

“Blame” is such an emotionally charged word. Scoble knows this. This might get you on techmeme, but over time this kind of link-baiting erodes credibility.

Scoble has gone way above the norm with the amount of people he follows on Twitter, I mean sure he can be so involved with a community but when it seems that Twitter’s database is compromised of little stability how can he continue to do this to them!!

Josh Chandler
http://www.joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com

I wonder whether you’d agree with my assessment on whether Twitter’s reputation can be saved?
http://tinyurl.com/6x3gbw

I’m getting tired of the Scoble and Arrington “it’s all about me” show, it is getting old fast.

Gentlemen, you are not the center of the universe.

I see more than a few people commenting here who might be feeling the same way.

I predict we will see a Scoble and Arrington backlash some time in the future, as people get tired of the games they are playing.

Who needs brick and mortar tabloids when you can get this for free!

I agree, they need to fix their problems. However all these “flash in the pan” sites are exactly that. Once this gets really main stream we will see who the winner is.

Either MSFT or Google need to buy Twitter and fast, before the pretty significant mind-share they have accumulated evaporates.

Frankly I am very surprised that MSFT hasn’t moved already, unlike GOOG with Jaiku, they don’t even have Micro-blogging in their arsenal.

Now there would be a worthy project for them to hone their skills at cloud computing and search (Twitter is badly in need of more useful NATIVE search/tag/filter/sort facilities to make the onslaught of potentially useful data, well, useful…

(What if Scoble could subsegment his follower/following lists, with e.g. “all followers who have ever used the term “branding” in a tweet”, right now it’s either all of Twitter with “track”, or single user on Tweetscan. Also note that the overview of one’s follower list is almost completely useless right now, since there is no way of sorting them in any predictable way, e.g. last-in, # of followers, etc. etc.)

Alas, since MSFT still doesn’t get the Internet much less Web2.0, it’s more likely that Google will move eventually after seeing that Jaiku has already missed the boat as far as mind-share/branding/positioning is concerned. Twitter(ing) has already become “the verb” for micro-blogging. Would be same as the Google Video vs. YouTube story, except that Twitter can still be had for, what, $100M or less (given their recent problems?).

Twitter already integrates with GTalk, it really seems like a no-brainer.

Or… possibly… can you say “bidding war”?!?