Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

hent — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:30:10 -0000

Now FriendFeed adds Twitter, it doesn’t replace one.But Twitter bugs… It’s a road to hell!

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Jon Unger — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:02:17 -0000

If Twitter calculated the cost of this downtime it would push their executives to implement better practices around their availability management. I calculated that a company with $10M of sales revenue would have lost about $14k over the course of the 12 hours. Read more at http://www.itserviceweek.com/archives/16

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Sam Jones — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:10:41 -0000

FriendFeed's "comment stream" is genius and I suspect will effectively steal some traffic from (blogs|twitter|jaiku|youtube|etc)

It does have some major areas for improvement though and I pointed three of the them out here: http://www.samuofm.com/2008...

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

honewatson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:45:10 -0000

Maybe because Twitter is in RoR and Friendfeed probably in Python.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

ryan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:26:12 -0000

Damn and twitter was going to revolutionize the way we... have really incredibly short attention spans and are self absorbed and think everytime we burp the world outta know.

Twitter's down. W T F cares?

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Christopher Coulter — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:13:26 -0000

But yet only a handful of tech bloggers have ever heard of WAM Picaso, Prescient Systems, G2 e-SCOR or IFS Apps.

Nah nah nah.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Trevor Speirs — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:41:30 -0000

Interesting comment about Stanford MBAs and Twitter awareness. I am finishing up my final year at The Merage School of Business and I have been leading the charge of introducing our graduating class to Twitter in our innovative EDGE course.
It is a work in progress to help them understand the value of Twitter, but at least they have been exposed to it.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Joining Dots — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:32:37 -0000

One of the reasons you might be seeing such rapid growth on FriendFeed is thanks to the great sign-up process they have designed, which includes you among a bunch of suggested subscriptions to get started. They've made it very easy to import other sources like Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Google Reader, Flickr accounts and co. Far better than any other start-up tech I can think of.

I don't find FriendFeed useful for real-time conversations. For me, it works best as an aggregator, both to publish a stream of what I've been collecting/sharing for others to view and for me to view other peoples' streams. It's interesting to see how differently people are using it. Perhaps an indicator that FriendFeed is looking more like a platform than an application?

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Ben Kessler — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:14:58 -0000

I'm sorry but there is just too much noise on FriendFeed for me to ever use it as my main communication tool. Twitter is THE communication tool for me to connect with my friends and followers, share links and thoughts. I see FriendFeed as a complimentary service to Twitter.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

nickc321 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:02:02 -0000

when discussing Twitter or Friendfeed with MBA students one must not forget Facebook... I'm in IT and I both Twit and use FF (among others), but my wife, she is an MBA student (DC area), and her entire program does Facebook. They send messages like Twitter and now they are aggregating like FF. So basically FB is a one stop shot for them. If it is not on Facebook or sent via email (or even their Google Group) it doesn't happen... As for me using Twit over FF, well if I could post to FF via my cell and or IM, well then I may start sharing directly via FF, but till then... Twit definitely covers me for instant sharing.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Brah Shil — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:59:04 -0000

Get a life. Twitter and FriendFeed are walled gardens and ivory towers for the self selecting sufferers of mental diarhia. While you pose on them, the world passes you by.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Salubri — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:56:00 -0000

Well said Mike D...

First off - Robert you are a TNBT (The Next Big Thing) evangelist and love to shout out about how great the upcoming services are. Respect for that - I think a large percentage of their growth is down to you and people like you promoting them. This is a good thing...

Twitter is about shouting something out to the empty space that is the web and occasionally getting back something cool. I don't rely on it for conversation (and I hope none of the people I follow do) as the signal to noise ration is very low (and I only follow a hundred or so people) but sometimes you can have a fun conversation or help someone out...

If people are having their conversations hurt by twitter dropping posts they should make sure that people know to contact them by an alternate method if they get no response... It's like CB radios - and old school networking if you don't get a "gotcha, over" or an "ACK" you should assume sending failed or is being ignored or MIGHT be read later.

FeedFriend on the other hand is a big ol' tool for communicating and stalking. I think it's great but I wouldn't replace something like Twitter with it in a million years... Complementary yes - competetive no.

Cheers.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Mike D — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:10:54 -0000

"I’m also noticing another thing: many of my friends are answering Twitter messages in FriendFeed."

How is this any different from the model that Twitter has always had? Twitter gets 10x traffic from the API versus the Twitter web site. I use FriendFeed AND Twitter and the fact that I might respond to a message from FriendFeed is no different from me responding to a message from Twhirl.

Also, I have only chosen to follow a small percentage of the people that I'm following on Twitter (about 50 out of 600) in FriendFeed. If I followed all 600 of them it would be an information flow tsunami and it would make FriendFeed completely unusable from me. I have cherry picked about 50 people from my 600 Twitter friends and that's working very well for me. I really think Twitter and FriendFeed can coexist and complement each other. I don't see it as a competition.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Sash — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:08:41 -0000

The twitter UI is simple to understand. The FriendFeed one is just confusing as hell. Tried to get my head around it but it's just such a mess with no way of sorting the feeds.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Robert Scoble — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:55:11 -0000

Scott Barnes: I'm not paid or compensated by FriendFeed. I just love their service.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Peter Thomas — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:21:10 -0000

lol @ RoR comment :)

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Scott Barnes — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:00:11 -0000

Is this an infomercial for FriendFeed?

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Bob — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:09:05 -0000

I hadn't noticed Twitter having issues. That is because I am spending less time on Twitter, even though I am posting.

While FF is popular, I think SocialThing has a better approach. Rather than comment at FF, ST posts to the platform one is responding to. So, if I read one of your tweets at ST and respond, it responds to Twitter. To me that is far more powerful than creating yet another social network.

ST aggregates all one's networks and allows him to post directly to those networks from one dashboard. That seems to be the way to go, as far as I am concerned.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

trench — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:22:52 -0000

Twitter is not the next Friendster.

The site/service does definitely have its pro's (established growing user base)and con's (rails), but I'm fairly certain Twitter falls into the Flickr/del.icio.us category of anti-fail in the long-term.

I'm just anxious to see what Google plans on doing with Jaiku in the long-term. I believe there's something up Goog's sleeve that we've yet to hear about in regards to future-Jaiku.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

andrew — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:04:15 -0000

From Facebook to Twitter to Friendfeed to the next big 2.1 web thingie
Twitter is probably the next Friendster

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Igor Poltavskiy — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:02:41 -0000

Now FriendFeed adds Twitter, it doesn't replace one.But Twitter bugs... It's a road to hell!

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

mrshl — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:38:03 -0000

Bless you, Steve.

It's this disconnect between the technorati and normal people that seems to lead to perception gaps. You point out one of them (i.e., people who have heard of Twitter vs. those who could care less).

I will point out another. I have many non-techie friends who actually LIKE Twitter and use it regularly. Neither myself nor any of my Twitter-loving pals noticed any downtime. Why? Probably because they access Twitter using Gmail. But I use Twhirl, and I didn't notice any problems either. Perhaps all these people who follow 20,000 other users aren't getting decent performance because they've rendered the service useless.

I don't know, but there's definitely a disconnect between the small army of chicken little bloggers and the larger contingent of silent, happy users.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

trench — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:36:16 -0000

/me dittos the STILL lol’ing at the ‘ruby on rails’ comment.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Steve — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:24:03 -0000

more proof that web 2.0 nerds and silicon valley builds software for themselves and not to solve business problems. Imagine that! A group of MBA's at one of the best business schools in the country not having heard of software service that offers no business value and is unstable at best. I rather doubt they've heard of Zoho, Thinkfree, or even Basecamp. But ask them about Sametime or Office Communicator or any other platform that can be federated and I'm sure you'd get some hands raised. Or ask them about SAP, peoplesoft or even Salesforce.com

What your exercise did was to reinforce the fact you and your peers live in a sheltered bubbled world using tools that don't offer much business or even normal end user value.

Re: Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success

Confortis — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:15:59 -0000

I think it's great that Twitter is down. Take it from someone who has spent many hours Twittering .. it is a colossal waste of energy. Now, maybe I have time to actually read something instead of living off the fumes of other people who have read something.