Evan Sims

FriendFeed is not an alternative to Twitter. Get over it.

This week all I seem to be hearing is people wanting to describe FriendFeed as some sort of reasonable alternative to Twitter. It isn’t. I love FriendFeed to death, perhaps even moreso than I do Twitter these days, but it wasn’t designed to be a messaging system or to compete with Twitter; it was designed to be precisely what it is: a lifestream aggregator with social elements. And it does it amazingly well.

I think people enjoy FriendFeed so much for what it is, they want to pretend it’s suitable to fulfill this gaping void Twitter’s constant issues has created. But FriendFeed isn’t suitable for this kind of stuff. It lacks the IM, the SMS, the email and, frankly, the structure of the site doesn’t lend itself to conversations terribly well. It’s great for commenting or brief discussions, but if you try to follow a thread of replies to something Scoble says, it’s truly difficult.

Could FriendFeed be a Twitter competitor? Sure. Everyone could be if they put the time and money into retrofitting the system to do it. But I don’t think that’s honestly what FriendFeed wants to be. I know it isn’t what I want them to be.

Web 2.0 is all about doing one thing and doing it right; FriendFeed is already there as a product (with the exception that it needs a much broader range of service support, like profilactic does.) Twitter needs a lot of work, but in the mean time there’s sites like Jaiku, Pownce and a new one I’ve been playing with today called Plurk. They all do a much better job of microblogging because that’s what they were designed from the ground up to do.

I understand the sentiment, everyone, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree wanting FriendFeed to be something it isn’t.

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.’ …

Creepy People are Creepy

It’s been kind of a weird week. My family spent last weekend in Louisville, where I had a great time hanging out with Brian and finally visiting his new office at CNET. I always feel weird coming back from a visit there, because it still feels like home in a lot of ways. I lived there for 8 years, after all, and some of my best memories were made there. A lot of history in those streets.

At any rate, it’s been a pretty busy week. I started a new character development writing class this week. This has to be my third class on the subject. I don’t mind, though; I really enjoy writing, and it’s good practice. I know I’ll be doing a lot of it after I graduate. So far things are going well; the work load doesn’t look like it will be too bad, too.

I spent much of the evening browsing deviantART, as I often enjoy doing; it’s such an amazing site. So much creativity crammed together in one place. Of course, not everyone has the same idea of what makes good art. I have trouble finding any significance in a lot of the stuff that gets posted, but I suppose the whole thing is more about personal expression than really seeking critique from peers.

Still, some of the crap really creeps me out. I don’t get “anthro” or furry stuff, for example. It’s essentially melding humans with animals. Here’s a site that caters to it specifically. The concept itself isn’t creepy, I guess, but how intensely people get into is. Take this video of a recent “Anthrocon” convention. I mean, it’s cool that everyone seems to be enjoying themselves so much, but… yikes. How do you explain to your kids that you have to go out of town so you can dress up in a giant bunny suit and play tug of war with several hundred other costumed adults?

Eh.

My folks are heading to Ireland this weekend. This will be the first time in God knows how many years that they’ve gone by themselves. I always love to head over there, but I don’t have the cash for it this time around. No worries, they deserve some time to themselves, and it’ll give me a chance to get a ton of work done.