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Yesterday I attended Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit, held at the Presidio in San Francisco. Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang provides a good summary of the panel that he moderated: Social Media Measurement: Dashboards vs GPS. The conference wraps up today. Follow my Twitterstream for my comments / observations.

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…

I’m trying out a new photo sharing service called Photrade (>>coverage on TechCrunch). The twist is that you get paid when your photos are shared by other people. You can also make money by selling photo-related products such as prints, T-shirts, mugs, etc. Below is an example of one of my photos with an embedded ad.

Michael Wesch has created another video…

This is a good overview of del.icio.us, my favorite social bookmarking service. You can find my del.icio.us page here.

By now, just about everyone who is interested in Web 2.0 has seen the The Machine is Us/ing Us video. Here’s a video of the creator of that video (Michael Wesch, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University) speaking at the recent Web 2.0 conference. He breaks down each part of the video, explaining what he was trying to accomplish and how he went about producing it. The video cuts off part-way through his talk. I will post a link to the complete presentation if and when I find it.

Related:

The last session that I attended on the final day of web 2.0 EXPO was The Social Media Revolution: You Oughta Be in Pictures (and Podcasting, and Vlogging). The panel was made up of Thomas Hawk, Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, and Jeremiah Owyang. There’s been discussion over the past week or so about whether the trend towards live video streaming and Twittering is information overload a Web 2.0 echo chamber. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, this was a very interesting panel discussion. I was able to get some video from the fourth row.

Thomas Hawk talks about photo-blogging.

Chris Pirillo talks about live video (using Ustream.tv) and the impact that it has had on his ability to interact with his audience in a new way.

The panel talks about the power of the “Sneeze Effect” – the ability for social media to spread around very rapidly.

The panel talks about the impact of Ustream.tv.

Robert Scoble talks about what it was like to do a live video broadcast at web 2.0 EXPO.

The panel talks about the challenges of finding the signal through the noise.

Stewart Butterfield (flickr), Biz Stone (Twitter), and Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) at the Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users panel.

More photos here.

I’ve been attending the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone West. More photos here.

Here’s video of Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo broadcasting live at the same time on Ustream.tv. Robert had an EVDO card so he was able to broadcast from his car. Scoble was doing this as a dry run for doing a live video feed from the Web 2.0 conference on Monday. Jeremiah Owyang has more details on Scoble’s set-up here.