mad dog in the fog

• Enterprise Adoption of Web 2.0: It’s Happening - ReadWriteWeb
  (tags: enterprise2.0)
• Yet Another Drama About Twitter - GigaOM
  Om Malik: “there’s this belief that Twitter, the ultimate tool of our collective narcissism, should be so lucky to have super users, that they are what make it popular with everybody else. I don’t subscribe to that point of view, but hey that’s just me.”
  (tags: twitter)
• Playland-Not-at-the-Beach Grand Opening | Laughing Squid
  “The museum is a labor of love by Richard Tuck, a Bay Area native who, as a child, regularly visited San Francisco’s famous Ocean Beach amusement park, Playland at the Beach.”
  (tags: bayarea weekendideas)
• Going For A Hat Trick At The Buzzer, Twitter Should Offer Pro Account’s
  “Will [pro accounts] solve the problem? No, but it will force users to think more about sharing only what’s necessary over Twitter, which may help downtime and Web 2.0 noise in general.”
  (tags: twitter)
• MyFox Washington DC | Union Station Photo Flap (VIDEO)
  “…one place where taking pictures is frowned upon is Union Station. Fox 5’s Tom Fitzgerald investigates why security is telling people to turn off their cameras.”
  (tags: photography)
• LOST Podcast: The Transmission » Blog Archive » There’s No Place Like Home - Parts 2 and 3
  [Spoiler Alert] Don’t read this if you haven’t watched the season finale of Lost yet
  (tags: lost)
• Giants turn triple play against Padres
  First Giants triple play since 1999. Includes a video clip.
  (tags: baseball mlb sfgiants)

• Create Rounded Corners For Images with RoundPic
  Looks like a handy tool.
  (tags: photoediting)
• Twitter Technology Blog: You’ve Got Q’s, We’ve Got A’s
  Twitter addresses questions about their architecture, stability, issues, etc.
  (tags: twitter)
• Stop Twitter Spam » Did Twitter Spammers Cause Downtime on Twitter?
  (tags: twitter)

• Official Google Mac Blog: Mac OS X 10.5.3: sync Google Contacts
  The Address Book application in Mac OS X 10.5.3 now lets iPhone users sync their Address Book with Google Contacts.
  (tags: gmail macosx)
• Twitter Status
  Twitter has started a status blog
  (tags: twitter)
• D6 Highlights | AllThingsD
  Video highlights from the All Things Digital conference happening this week in San Diego
  (tags: conferences allthingsd)
• Favrd
  A stream of tweets that have been favorited by multiple people
  (tags: twitter)

• SFGate > Child’s play, on the cheap
  Affordable things to do in the Bay Area
  (tags: parenting weekendideas bayarea)

• The Challenges of Scaling Twitter’s Follower Model - Tim Marman’s Loosely Coupled
  A really good description of Twitter’s scaling challenges. It is NOT as simple as you might thing.
  (tags: twitter scalability)

• 500 Friendfeed Rooms
  FriendFeed recently rolled out FriendFeed Rooms. Here’s a handy guide to 500 rooms. Would be cool if the creator of this list broke these into categories.
  (tags: friendfeed)
• louisgray.com: Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality
  “The human brain is an amazing sponge, ready to take in new information, and if you practice, practice, practice, you can train it, like a muscle, to be ready for exercise.”
  (tags: attention)
• The only thing Twitter has to fear, is Twitter itself » VentureBeat
  “FriendFeed is not going to kill Twitter. Each service provides something different, and at least for me, compliment one another in some regards.”
  (tags: friendfeed twitter)

• Good folders to exclude from Time Machine backups » Ryan Block
  (tags: backup macosx timemachine)

• Hueniverse: Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I
  The challenges of building a micro-blogging site, from the developer of a Twitter-clone
  (tags: twitter)
• Twitter may have more serious issues than its downtime » VentureBeat
  I’m quoted in this article: “it seems like Twitter is acting more like a phone co. operating a network vs a social network with community mgmt [management] obligations.”
  (tags: twitter socialnetworking)
• Techmeme: Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service (Ariel Waldman)
  Controversy about Twitter’s Terms of Service
  (tags: twitter)

Take a look at this and guess which company they’re talking about…

When service was restored this evening, the [COMPANY X] chat room was flooded with comments from customers, many of whom said they were growing tired of repeated glitches.

Although the disruption today was by far the worst in the company’s short history, it has had a series of smaller glitches in the last year.

”There really is no excuse for so many problems other than poor management,” remarked one [COMPANY X] customer.

Other comments included ”[COMPANY X] needs to get its act together,” …

A few customers said they had switched to the … site run by [COMPANY Y], one of a number of companies that have begun an [xxxxx] business to capture a piece of the enormous on-line [yyyyy] that was pioneered by [COMPANY X]. But others said they would stick with [COMPANY X].

So which company are they talking about? Did you guess Twitter? No, it’s from a June 1999 New York Times article about a little company called eBay.

No doubt, Twitter has had a rough couple of weeks. It’s been up and down like a yo-yo and people are frustrated. People are calling for a decentralized Twitter and some people even organized a Twit-out, which was a 24 hour boycott of the Twitter service. Even some of Twitter’s biggest supporters, like Chris Brogan, are furious.

While I can understand all of these negative feelings about Twitter, I just think we need to remember that just about every popular web service has gone through this phase at some point in their history. eBay, Amazon, AOL - the list goes on. And all of those companies worked through those difficult periods and went on to become models of stability. Most people who were around during Web 1.0 will tell you that these companies did not solve these problems overnight. It took months and the progress was often two steps forward, three steps back.

Oh, and remember - this is a free service! Let’s give the Twitter crew a break and save our complaining for when this is something that we’re paying for.

Update:
In this sea of negativity towards Twitter, it’s nice to see this type of support from Chris Wetherell (Google). I spotted this comment from Chris on FriendFeed…

Rough week for Twitter. I’ve watched dozens of new, popular, and free web services experience scaling difficulties. I’m always saddened by knee-jerk responses of technologists who blithely assert “I guess they don’t test their software” during outages. Testing is only a part of prevention and is always a moving target. Diagnosis and response can sometimes take hours/days/weeks/months depending on the problem or the system. Money or funding doesn’t automatically translate into an ideal production, staging, and analytic environment overnight (especially if growing by millions) and NO service or platform is immune. None! Not One. Happens within Google all the time. (You might not know that the Reader team has been sleepless this week in attempts to keep the service running.) I figure those of us who can help out with coding or sysadmin work to services we love probably should offer our efforts pro bono. Might not be able to help - but might as well offer. That is, if we care about them…

• Wikis Are Now Serious Business - ReadWriteWeb
  (tags: wiki)
• The Geni Blog: New Feature - GEDCOM Import!
  I’ve been waiting for this feature.
  (tags: genealogy)