Evan Sims

TwitterBash launches

Today marks the launch of TwitterBash, a concept conceived and designed by my good friend Judson Collier. Judson hired me on to work on the project about a month and a half ago, and I think we’re both quite pleased with how it turned out.

TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which allows folks to post snippets and quote conversations from IRC, and applies it to Twitter. Just sign up for an account, then head to the submit page. Pop in the permalink for a tweet you want to quote and you’re done. Tweets can be voted up or down by users, and we base our popularity index off that score (which we call karma.) You can even embed quoted tweets into your own pages using a number of methods.

I think Judson came up with a great concept here. It’s simple, it’s fun, and people will hopefully have a great time using it.

For those curious about the tech behind it (that was my department, after all), TwitterBash runs atop PHP5 and the wonderful CodeIgniter framework. Thanks to CI, I was able to rapidly pump out a prototype in a matter of days for Judson and I to begin playing with.

Give it a look, bash your favorites and have a good time!

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.’ …

Web APIs by Example, Part I: Twitter

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are essentially standardized methods for applications to talk to one another and share information. In desktop applications, the operating system provides a full range of APIs in order for your programs to run and interact with it (in Windows an app might register itself as an option for when you right click an icon; or on a Mac an app will hide itself from the dock.) On the web, APIs are usually provided as a means of importing data to other services, or using third party clients to push information to your account.

Since Twitter is all the rage these days, I thought it would be a great starting point to introduce you to the world of web APIs and how simple they really are to work with. Twitter, like most presencing services, has a very limited range of API calls because, well, it’s a very simple service. The documentation for Twitter’s API can be found hrere. The Twitter API, all be it simple, has allowed great applications like Twitterific and Twittervision to be created.

Continue Reading ‘Web APIs by Example, Part I: Twitter’ …