Evan Sims

Twitter: when all else fails, blame your users.

You’ve probably seen it all over your feed reader today; blogs screaming “Twitter just called Scoble out!”, or “Twitter is punishing their most popular users!”, and frankly they’re right. Alex probably thought he was doing the right thing and taking a proactive approach by explaining things in his blog post yesterday, but he made some poor choices that Twitter is going to have to face this weekend- namely, stating that a factor of the huge downtime issues Twitter has been having is users like Scoble who have tens of thousands of followers are causing database calls in the system to pile up.

As Scoble so eloquently put it in a Seesmic video response to the blog post today, bullshit.

Now, to be clear; Alex didn’t call Scoble out explicitly. It was inferred by the fact that, well, Scoble is pretty much king of Twitter in terms of followers. It was him and a handful of other users (who, it should be pointed out, would also qualify as these evil-doers to the system) made Twitter by singing it’s praises.

More to the point, the blog post is bullshit because it doesn’t explain why Twitter has been having constant issues since day one, long before Scoble and others amassed their base of thousands of followers. Even more so, it doesn’t explain how Twitter is going to fix these issues. So the database is backing up… how are you going to resolve this? Throw more servers at it? Get rid of your ridiculous XMPP-based message backend? Rewrite the site in a language that is actually scalable? For a post entitled questions and answers, there were far too few answers and way too much finger pointing. Let’s be clear what Twitter is: it’s a shit ton of text flying around, and a bunch of databases to store it in. This isn’t that complicated.

Alex isn’t a bad guy, or an idiot. I don’t think his intention was to make it seem as though Twitter is calling these people out. However, Alex isn’t a PR guy. He’s a developer. And, speaking from my own perspective as a developer, we shouldn’t be put in charge of trying to explain things to customers, users or the press. We aren’t good at sugar coating things, or explaining problems to users in a way that makes it consumable. We’re quick to blame the users because, well frankly, it’s usually user error that’s the problem. But users don’t want to hear that- they just want to know when it’ll be fixed.

Continue Reading ‘Twitter: when all else fails, blame your users.’ …

Major updates to SmugURL

Just a quick post to let folks know that I’ve pushed a major update to my SmugMug URL forwarding service SmugURL. It’s got a new web UI, a revised API and a lot of improvements behind the scenes. The rework I put into it allowed me to lay some framework for some future features I’ve been thinking about adding, namely social bookmarking, voting on links and optional hit tracking complete with fancy bars, graphics and other bells and whistles.

Give it a try, let me know what you think.

P.S. Don’t forget, LOST tonight!

Getting FolderShare for Mac to Play Nice

I’ve been using Microsoft’s FolderShare (now Windows Live FolderShare blah blah blah) service for years now, and I’ve got to admit that as much as I hate most of Microsoft’s Live apps, FolderShare is one utility that I couldn’t live without. Well, OK- I could, but I wouldn’t want to.

My recent addition of a shiny new MacBook Air to the household introduced an odd problem; while my Mac Pro has never had issues syncing files to the PCs in the house using FolderShare, the Air refused to do so. After some cursing, I did a bit of Googling and came across the solution.

Disable FolderShare encryption across all the Macs and PCs you want to sync. Yep.

Now, don’t ask me why my Mac Pro didn’t have the problem with encryption; both machines run Leopard, and neither have their Firewalls enabled. In any case, disabling encryption solves the problem, though I’m not at all a fan of the fact that my data is getting tossed around in plain text now. I suppose I could funnel everything through my Hamachi network to encrypt it, but… bleh.

Anyway, there’s the solution, Mr. Googler with a Mac. Hopefully Microsoft will fix the problem sooner rather than later, but if their track record with FolderShare updates is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m hoping to get a Dropbox invite to see if it’s a worthy replacement. Stay tuned on that.

Resolving “Unsupported Operating System” Error in Windows Media Player 11

Fresh install of your slipstreamed Service Pack 3 media and missing Windows Media Player 11? Microsoft has yet to update the WMP11 download to support clean installs for Media Center with Service Pack 3, but here’s a fix that should work on any XP installation where you encounter the problem:

1. Download Windows Media Player 11
2. Using WinRAR, 7zip or any other archiving app that can support it, extract wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe.
3. Run wmfdist11.exe from those extracted files.
4. Run wmp11.exe, also from those files.
5. Enjoy.

Encountered this issue this afternoon, so I thought I’d share a fix. Good luck.

Jonathan Coulton and the Pirate Connection

As some of you may have heard from my Twitter stream last night, myself, Jim, Steph and Reid went to see Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm’s concert in Chicago last night, and it was awesome. Coulton’s music was even more impressive in person, and Paul and Storm were quite hilarious.

Here’s a video from last night (there’s quite a few more on my Viddler account):

I’ll definitely be looking forward to their next show.