Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Twitter blames its users

Re: Twitter blames its users

Mark Drapeau — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:39:37 -0000

Who's Robert Scoble? I'm Mark Drapeau.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Peter Parker — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:44:41 -0000

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Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.”

“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”

So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.

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Here's my two cents.

For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don't understand this and they don't care.

They don't know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8x8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.

I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don't care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News Mermaid

They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Goatse — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:20:31 -0000

Wow, you are a megalomaniac, and a not-very-nice one at that. Spoiled egotist. "Oh, I have 20 thousand friends and they're blaming people like me"

give me a break.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Alcara Jose Hiram — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:07:56 -0000

Maybe Scoble is just a big-headed that thinks he is the only one with big numbers in twitter. What about Twitter against his clients? Since when you paid twitter for their services? Friendfeed? Give it a month or so and you will find something wrong about the service that you don’t like and you will start attacking them too. Who's next QIK? Plunker? Whatever is new next week? Scoble move on please.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Ben Darlow — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 03:19:56 -0000

Erm, how is it you conclude that 'popular' equates to 'best' where users of twitter are concerned? Best for whom? For twitter, who have yet to come up with a way of making money from their principle activity, popular certainly doesn't equate best. And for everyone else? Well, considering Dunbar's number, it seems highly unlikely that anybody who follows your model (of having a very large number of followers AND follows a large number of people) would represent high value in terms of conversation. Much like any conversation, it has to be between a small enough number for it to make sense, otherwise all it is, is a crowd of people shouting at each other, hoping that they get heard.

Considering this, it's hardly surprising that Twitter 'blames' its 'users'. It puts me in mind of the early days of broadband ISPs imposing bandwidth caps because of a minority who abused the system with torrent downloads etcetera. It's not fair when companies do something like that, but it is at least understandable, given how this minority of people are essentially using the system in way it wasn't designed for, and so pushing it to untenable limits.

Re: Twitter blames its users

pbx — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:33:22 -0000

sometimes "high quality" problems don't feel so high quality. i can only imagine how the twitter folks feel trying to play catch up to their success.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Jerry — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 02:15:56 -0000

"there is a larger question of a popular “FREE” service being available 24×7.. what shud be the expectation from them? Zilch or full availability? what if gmail or live mail went down for the period that twitter has been? what happens then?"

The expectation should be: you get what you pay for. Gmail and Hotmail have been down for lengthy periods of time in the past. And surprising as it may be; miraculously, civilization continued to progress.

Re: Twitter blames its users

AlexSchleber — Sat, 31 May 2008 14:00:08 -0000

Either MSFT or Google need to buy Twitter and fast, before the pretty significant mind-share they have accumulated evaporates.

Frankly I am very surprised that MSFT hasn't moved already, unlike GOOG with Jaiku, they don't even have Micro-blogging in their arsenal.

Now there would be a worthy project for them to hone their skills at cloud computing and search (Twitter is badly in need of more useful NATIVE search/tag/filter/sort facilities to make the onslaught of potentially useful data, well, useful...

(What if Scoble could subsegment his follower/following lists, with e.g. "all followers who have ever used the term "branding" in a tweet", right now it's either all of Twitter with "track", or single user on Tweetscan. Also note that the overview of one's follower list is almost completely useless right now, since there is no way of sorting them in any predictable way, e.g. last-in, # of followers, etc. etc.)

Alas, since MSFT still doesn't get the Internet much less Web2.0, it's more likely that Google will move eventually after seeing that Jaiku has already missed the boat as far as mind-share/branding/positioning is concerned. Twitter(ing) has already become "the verb" for micro-blogging. Would be same as the Google Video vs. YouTube story, except that Twitter can still be had for, what, $100M or less (given their recent problems?).

Twitter already integrates with GTalk, it really seems like a no-brainer.

Or... possibly... can you say "bidding war"?!?

Re: Twitter blames its users

Tony — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:19:32 -0000

I agree, they need to fix their problems. However all these "flash in the pan" sites are exactly that. Once this gets really main stream we will see who the winner is.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Toby Getsch — Sat, 31 May 2008 10:20:10 -0000

Who needs brick and mortar tabloids when you can get this for free!

Re: Twitter blames its users

Eguled — Sat, 31 May 2008 09:51:39 -0000

I’m getting tired of the Scoble and Arrington “it’s all about me” show, it is getting old fast.

Gentlemen, you are not the center of the universe.

I see more than a few people commenting here who might be feeling the same way.

I predict we will see a Scoble and Arrington backlash some time in the future, as people get tired of the games they are playing.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Katie Paine — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:26:20 -0000

I wonder whether you'd agree with my assessment on whether Twitter's reputation can be saved?
http://tinyurl.com/6x3gbw

Re: Twitter blames its users

Josh Chandler — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:17:22 -0000

Scoble has gone way above the norm with the amount of people he follows on Twitter, I mean sure he can be so involved with a community but when it seems that Twitter's database is compromised of little stability how can he continue to do this to them!!

Josh Chandler
http://www.joshchandlerblog...

Re: Twitter blames its users

Walter Higgins — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:46:05 -0000

"Blame" is such an emotionally charged word. Scoble knows this. This might get you on techmeme, but over time this kind of link-baiting erodes credibility.

Re: Twitter blames its users

sull — Sat, 31 May 2008 03:04:14 -0000

robert, can you please try to be less self-absorbed?
it is beyond me why you are so popular.

so you are offended and feel that it was insinuated by twitter that the big scoble is solely to blame. you take the venture beat post as an excuse to unleash your anger towards twitter when they are admitting plainly that their service is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
they are not making excuses that are bullshit. they are pointing out several causes of problems... one of which has to do with the way popular (nothing to do with best, btw) users are handled... in all aspects. it is a known fact now that active users with many followers require intense processing. this in conjunction with other issues such as 3rd party services, IM messaging and an overall limited info architecture that was admittedly not conceived to be what twitter has become. this has all been stated clearly by twitter and others.... you even.

i commented on dave winer and om malik's blog recently about this topic and expressed that if i were one of these resource intensive users... i would voluntarily take some measures to ease things for twitter.... whether or not they needed or wanted such action by a user of their service.... just because i think they deserve that kind of support from the community who has used the hell out of their service for the past 12-18 months.
they are in a unique position. it seems right to support them as the leading company in the micro-messaging space. because like it or not, a user like you is almost like a dos attack on twitter at this point. and if i was a very active popular user, i would chill out and offer to do whatever to ease the burden until they are able to sort through the priority issues of fixing and re-archtecting components so that twitter can be what it has evolved to be.

you make alot of comparisons to other technologies and services when trying to make a case that twitter sucks. but i dont think any of those points have merit... and most are moot. you can praise friendfeed all day long but it's not a fair comparison. and your other comparisons show your lack of technical understandings on the depths of system architecture. you are tech buzz guy.... one that swims in the surface area.... one that gets drunk on the hype. if you truly understood how all the related tech works... you would not be so hasty with your comments and big attitude. but it must be tough to tame that ego with all those very close friends following your digital ways.

get over yourself. i sense that significant others are getting over you by now. i bet a good portion of your "friends" are just in it for the humor and entertainment and mockery aspect. because you dont have much to offer when it comes down to it. you just happen to be popular. and popular is never exclusive to the "best". look around and you will see that to be true... very true.

cheers.

sull

Re: Twitter blames its users

James — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:51:00 -0000

In other news, Twitter* reveals that they go down when there is too much database usage. Robert Scoble offended.

Seriously, they've previously stated that they designed twitter badly and are trying to fix it. Nobody is getting blamed, they're just saying that their system does note scale well and the database is getting way too many unnecessary calls because of it. (And hint that heavy users are generating many of them. You know it's true, man. ;-) )As a fellow programmer, I can sympathize that it's not the easiest or quickest thing in the world to fix broken architecture.

Anyway. Anyone else noticed that they have a new status screen for over capacity? Hilarious image. :-)
http://static.twitter.com/i...

Re: Twitter blames its users

Abhishek Kant — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:08:48 -0000

there is a larger question of a popular "FREE" service being available 24x7.. what shud be the expectation from them? Zilch or full availability? what if gmail or live mail went down for the period that twitter has been? what happens then?
http://www.abhishekkant.net...

Re: Twitter blames its users

Douglas Karr — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:01:23 -0000

Not sure they're blaming their users in as much as their application's usage. We all know how difficult it is to turn back the time on an established product - I hope Twitter is up for it and can use the $15 mil wisely. The largest hurdle is to try to not impact their users while they make the necessary development, architecture and infrastructure changes. The consequence, of course, is that this is a fickle Web 2.0 crowd that will drop them at a moment's notice for the next app in line. I understand each side's argument in this situation and empathize as the Director of Technology who adopted an app that's growing 100% per quarter. 'Do overs' aren't in the option booklet!

Re: Twitter blames its users

joaquin — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:49:35 -0000

Kawika,
I read your post regarding how to better organize your comments threads.
I am curious to know why you think cocomment is not satisfying your needs.
We show them in order of appearance with a drop down list per comment.
I am curious to know what your needs are.
You can reach me at joaquin at cocomment.com
Tks
J

Re: Twitter blames its users

Brian — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:33:53 -0000

Sheesh. If I were in Twitter management, the first thing I would do is turn off Scoble's account. He's not helping me one bit. And, I'm not making any revenue from him. So, he's more trouble than he's worth. If it is the "high profile users" causing the issues, then I'd turn off their accounts and see if that stablizes things, then work to figure out what the source of the problem is and fix it. I'd be fine with taking the PR hit. My guess is a relatively small percentage of my Twitter users even know who Scoble, Winer, and Arrington are. So....buh-bye. They cause me more costs than benefits at this point. And I can do this without telling them, or giving them a reason...according to the TOS.

Or, hell, I might just shut the whole thing down. Again, the TOS says I can do that.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Dawn Douglass — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:26:34 -0000

So what the heck are they going to do with the $15 million?? They could scrap the whole thing and start over and development wouldn't cost a fraction of that.

How much are they paying for bandwidth? Anybody have a clue?

Re: Twitter blames its users

scottgjerdingen — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:18:23 -0000

yea, at the risk of piling on, that was pretty weak of twitter.....blame users that contributed to its success. Even if true, there were so many better ways to handle this such as asking these highly active users to be an advocate for the solution.

Hopefully, Twitter will acquire some matured management to guide in issues such as this.

- scott -

Re: Twitter blames its users

erwin blom — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:09:08 -0000

Robert,
I am a fan of yours but surprised by this post.
I've been watching your interview with Biz and Ev and you are laughing and giggling. No critical questions, just laughing your nerves away.
And now with your computer at hand and no 'real' persons you start criticising on harsh way .
Be brave! Say those things interviewing !

Re: Twitter blames its users

geekmommy — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:36:35 -0000

I find it interesting that those condemning Robert for posting this don't really fall in the category "popular user" - I saw more than one "popular user" limiting their tweeting after reading what Alex posted and wasn't that surprised after reading that paragraph.

Notice that there wasn't a line pointed out - what is 'popular' in this context - 100+ follower/ings? 1000+? 10k+? How frequent is 'too frequent'? 3 tweets a day? and hour? 30?
The finger pointing was there - no matter how much I want to defend Twitter because I really want to see them succeed.

There was a brief reference at the end about script adders - but why not blame those folks from the get-go? Why not say "those accounts mass adding/following"? Because we know who someone is referring to by the word "popular", don't we?

The only reason I didn't make Dave Winer's "spewage" list is because he's never followed me (which is perfectly normal) but the %-following math has me right up there, thanks.
So I'm one of the reasons Twitter is having issues? I think not. Long before I had even 1 follower there were folks with 10k plus updates, thousands of followers and "popularity" - so if that was the issue, it should've been addressed last year some time... But it wasn't.

Look, let's be serious here for a minute. Twitter has had stability issues for a long time. They seemed to remedy a LOT of them around early February this year in time for SXSW. Then right about the time Blain leaves, we start seeing more and more issues. I'm not buying it. Suck it up Twitter and admit that the problem isn't coming from the outside, it's internal.

Re: Twitter blames its users

Muneeb — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:35:44 -0000

This is such a publicity stunt by Scoble. Worst than British tabloids, creating stuff outta nowhere.