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Perhaps this was different in the web 1.0 days when it took scores of developers and millions of dollars to build a functional web technology. Today, when one or two creative coders can build something really cool at home in their spare time, the technology has become more of a commodity, and it's the community that drives the real value (in the eyes of the users). Of course the big challenge to Twitter and others is not just maintaining the technology, but figuring out how to turn the value the community creates for their users into value for their investors.
So, the start-up challenge is to a) attract a community, b) have the technology in order to support that community, and c) have a viable business model to support the expense of a and b! But we all KNOW that... doing it is the hard part. ;-)
By the way, I agree on every point of your "Friendfeed rant", but I'm pretty confident it will improves the way you're waiting for this year. Or later. If it's even later, competitor might take its place.
First, that comment is idiotic. He treats “having passionate users” and “having a rock solid architecture” as an either/or proposition and it’s not. I have no problem with Twitter getting out the door early to increase their chances of adoption, that’s not the point of criticism here. The point of criticism is the fact that they’ve been around for 2 years and received $20 million in funding and they still didn’t fix their architecture.
Second, you say this is the “best comment” on the situation but then you spend a whole post refuting it. MikePK is suggesting that Grazr failed because they spent too many resources on their infrastructure. You then make a whole post on problems that Grazr has that have nothing to do with resources. You’re basically saying Grazr is a lame product idea and no amount of resources is going to fix that. A statement that refutes the comment you are quoting.
Honestly…sorry to get so annoyed but sometimes I wonder what you’re thinking when you post these things.
;)
If the site is that difficult to use, there's something wrong with your design.
I didn't say it's an either/or proposition, but for many small startups you have to choose where to focus your energies. On building something new that people take to, or building an architecture that can withstand every possible situation? Grazr's CTO said he spent too much time focusing on the architecture and not enough building a service that people loved.
My whole post was NOT a refutation of what he said, but rather a confirmation of it. It might "work" but it isn't very useful and it isn't going to attract users for a whole number of reasons.
Google, eBay, Amazon, PayPal - these are giants of the 'net because they solve problems normal people have. The scale they have to deal with is unbelievable. Twitter has a much smaller user base, an echo chamber, really, and a much smaller scalability challenge. The only reason they can't surmount it is that they've got such a horrible architecture, I mean really, who would ever think a site built with Ruby can scale?
I do agree with your point about Grazr. Technical architecture is all very exciting, but it doesn't matter if nobody uses the service.
To my "echo chamber" point, I saw several messages with your name in them. There might be "millions" of accounts, but there must be a pretty small group of active users if you are such a common subject of discussion.
Anyway whether Twitter is the next big thing or not, we agree on the main point, which is that they've reached a point where their downtime is hurting their growth. They got here by providing something useful, but they won't get to the next level unless they stabilize.
hey that makes sense....
Robert, thanks for the feedback. I've written a post (and cross posted it to our corporate blog) in response. http://mikepk.com/?p=18
Jeff: Yes I agree. As Technologists we look at things through the technology lens. Twitter is, to be honest, not that complicated a technology. What they do have is a community of passionate users.
Tony: We have *a lot* of features. Too many. It's something we've been thinking hard on. The videos were an attempt to make it clear what the workflow was supposed to be.
Tom: I didn't say it was an either or, but that it's a balance. Twitter focused everything on having users, we focused too much on features and our scaling infrastructure. It's a balance, one you have to deal with carefully with the limited amount of resources of a startup. What twitter has is the more important part of the equation (and in most ways a more difficult problem).
keith: I think our real issue is we've been looking for the right people to target. We haven't consciously been targeting A-listers or "weirdos" although it does happen to be the first example stream on the homepage (something we've noted and plan to change :) ).
Scoble said>I didn’t say it’s an either/or proposition, but for many small startups you have to choose where to focus your energies. On building something new that people take to, or building an architecture that can withstand every possible situation? Grazr’s CTO said he spent too much time focusing on the architecture and not enough building a service that people loved.
I Now Say>But see, that's my point. more resources doesn't make a better product if you're completely on the wrong track. To say it does would be like saying running will get you to your destination faster when you're headed in the complete opposite direction. The issues you outlined with Grazr wouldn't be helped by more technical resources.
Name – Technical Resources won't help
Solves a non-existant problem – Technical Resources won't help
Confusing UI – Technical Resources might help but people who make confusing interfaces tend to make them more confusing as they spend more time on them
Focus on A-List Blogs – Technical Resources won't help
Cold Language– Technical Resources won't help
Nothing moving on Grazr – endemic of all of the above so Technical Resources won't help
So you see, you are refuting what he said. He's saying he should have spent more resources on building a service that people love and less on scale and that, if he had, they'd be successful. Well your above points show he's wrong and that isn't the case. This in turn refutes his original point.
More important, for me anyway, is why I feel you don't see this which is that you are so engrained in your own philosophy (on scaling) that even when your own logic refutes it you can't see that. He said something that "sounded" true to you so you think he's right without subjecting it to scrutiny. When it is subjected to scrutiny it doesn't hold up.
So just to clear the air, you haven't given them money, have you? Not that I would mind, it just seems not to conform to your usual openness, etc., unless I've missed a post somewhere.
As engineers we obsess over the hard technology problems (scaling) and can overlook other issues. Twitter has the passionate users already, I contend that's actually a *harder* problem then building a scaling infrastructure.
As for MikePK's comment, I couldn't agree more. Too many startups spend way too much resources and effort in architecting a highly scalable system only to ask the question "Where are my users?". This is a trap that technologist often falls into. Better technology does not equal successful startup. It always starts with simplicity and clear value proposition to the mainstream users. For every Twitter, there are probably hundreds, if not more, of highly scalable over-architected sites that went nowhere.
Tip to Grazr, you already lost all your mainstream users with the term OPML as the first item for feed on your home page.
That's beautiful.
With RSS and Atom you can get this information quickly because of ping services which notify you when someone posts, if you are willing to get this information for everybody. Also Twitter provides access to it's public timeline via XMPP. However with other sites you have to poll and they have limits of the number of requests so you can't poll that often. If that wasn't bad enough on some sites it takes quite a few requests to just find out what your friends are doing.
I think in general the source sites' APIs are not designed for this type of usage and the challenge for them will be to create some sort of push API.
Not wanting to plug my own site too much but, in response to point 3, friendbinder.com has a "strict reverse-chronological view". However we only opened up the private beta on Friday and it wasn't designed for people like you (because as you say there are not many like you!) and I know currently it can't support more than 1000 twitter users very well.
I don't think anyone wants FriendFeed to be Twitter 2.0
We want FriendFeed to be the best social media aggregation system. Which it already is.
I think we all win (the users) if the best of breed services keep getting better at the one thing they do better than anyone else.
Fred
Oh, Steve Gillmor wants that! :-)
I agree that it's the best social media aggregation system. It's also the best conversation system on top of that aggregation. But, it could be so much more.
It's "how much more" that we're arguing over here.
Part of the reason we built so many features was the hope that someone would find a subset of them unique and useful and we could allocate resources to better satisfy those individuals needs. The serious downside though is that if you're not careful it can negatively impact your UI and usability. More importantly though it can negatively affect your message "what *are* you?". That's a question we struggle with.
Friendfeed does have an advantage that they've waited for people to digest their current feature set before adding. I think one of our issues is that we steamrolled ahead a little too quickly in expanding the service. We're actually considering stripping out a lot of the functionality to deliver a clearer message.
@mikepk, agreed, that's another thing us technologist have to watch out for, unending feature creep. IMO, for Web 2.0 sites, it's much better to get the features out earlier than later because users' feedback will help drive the changes. Often times, we can't predict what the users needs are and ended up all over the map with a plethora of features that aren't needed if we wait too long to get it in front of them.
Like you, I have learned that too many features confused the users and caused them to lose interests. Also, too many features can make the site seems like a horizontal play and that's very hard (IMO) these days to build mass traction.
Just my $0.02.
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