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May 17, 2008

Don’t Screw Your Partners Over A Marketing Promotion

Michael Arrington

107 comments »

Celebrities are starting to take notice of Seesmic, a “Twitter for video” service that lets people have asynchronous video conversations on the fly (see my disclosure, I am an investor).

First was Deepak Chopra, who made a whole series of videos for this site. And yesterday things got even more exciting, when Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett came on the site and had discussions with other users. Here’s one of the exchanges, between Jemima Kiss and Steven Spielberg. Here’s a Harisson Ford video. etc.

So that’s all really great, and I’m happy as an investor. But Seesmic made some terrible judgment calls yesterday around this promotion that has resulted in us removing it from our sites (we installed Seesmic video comments on all TechCrunch Network blogs last month).

First, we didn’t know about the promotion until reading about it this morning along with every one else. All we knew is that our sites all simultaneously went down three times yesterday. After the first time we identified the likely problem as Seesmic and contacted the company. They assured us there was no way the plugin could take the site down. When it happened a second time we disabled the Seesmic plugin and the sites went back up. We identified the problem - the plugin was loading an external Javascript file, and when Seesmic’s servers were down, we just sat and waited for it for up to two minutes before timing out.

Seesmic said they’d patch the problem in the next version (which will pull the Javascript call into the footer instead of the header, so TechCrunch can mostly load even if they are down), and said they shouldn’t be going down again in the meantime. We re-enabled the plugin.

Then we went down a third time late last night, and we disabled the plugin for good (until the new version is available).

This morning we heard from Seesmic that the reason for the downtime yesterday was due to multiple server reboots around the Spielberg promotion.

What They Should Have Done

A simple email to us telling us that they would need to be rebooting their servers periodically over the day would have let us prepare for this and disable the plugin as it was happening. That way, Seesmic video comments would have disappeared from the site for periods of time, but TechCrunch would not have gone down. Of course, as Seesmic grows, having properly architected plugins and server redundancy will also help ensure that this problem doesn’t occur again.

I understand that young startups need a little wiggle room to get things right, and I don’t mind testing that raw software on TechCrunch. Even if that means we go down occasionally during their growing pains.

But never withhold information from your partners and tell them that you have no idea what is causing downtime when you know exactly what the problem is. As exciting as getting Steven Spielberg on your site to talk to your users is, it is not worth being dishonest to partners.

I understand that Seesmic may have been hesitant to tell us about the promotion because they wanted to keep it quiet. But all they had to do was tell us before the downtime that it was going to occur, and we would have been happy. And Seesmic would still be an active plugin on TechCrunch.

Some of you may wonder why I’m calling out a company that I’ve invested in so harshly. The reason: I’m calling them out because they deserve it, and the fact that I invested in them means I need to be careful before giving them any kind of break.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Bart

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Or they can host things like their external Javascript files on another server that won’t be affected by high traffic. Videos go down, javascript stays up, partnering sites (ala TechCrunch) are not so glum

  2. MrCashyCash

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    Good. This is a lesson.

    Stay objective and cut insider ties.

  3. jeff

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    great news as an investor, bad news as a site owner. I would say that the good out weighs the bad on this one.

  4. DaveS

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    Oh wow… what an epic fail. Seesmic should have put all that money they spent on these marketing promotions on better servers and a better product.

    Horrible mismanagement.

    Mike, if you take a look at the number of video comments that have been left on the site, you should have realized that they’re more trouble than worth. No one uses them anymore.

    PS: Loic, there are two rules you should familiarize yourself with:
    1) You cannot polish a turd no matter how hard you try, and
    2) You cannot buy cool.

  5. Search Engine Optimization Journal

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

    That’s a shame that they did that.. perhap between this blog post outing them and TechCrunch not having their plugin on the site anymore, they will learn a valuable lesson.

  6. AW

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

    I like the full disclosure.

    I wonder what part of Seesmic decided it would be OK to (even temporarily) frag their partners without telling them. I can’t imagine making a decision like that myself, nor would many of the people I know… what’s up with that? Are managers / CEOs from another planet or something?

  7. Michael Arrington

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    DaveS - “Mike, if you take a look at the number of video comments that have been left on the site, you should have realized that they’re more trouble than worth. No one uses them anymore.”

    First, that’s not accurate. I really like the feature, and enough people are leaving them to start some good discussion. Second, this isn’t their core product, it’s simply an additional feature.

  8. Lee Bandoni

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

    I have a large number of content sites which are based on Wordpress and I have a number of custom plugins to help run the network. I learned first hand what can happen with a poorly codded widget when one of ours took down all our sites and it took almost a day to find the problem.

    You must be super annoyed to denounce Seesmic in this way. Lets hope everyone has learned their lesson and move on :P

  9. Mike D.

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    A good rule of thumb — no matter what the external site is — never, ever put another company’s external javascript in the head of your html document. I guess the notable exception is if yours is a crappy little site you don’t care about and the external site is a well known, 99.999999% uptime property like Google. But being Techcrunch, I’d argue no script you ever put on a page should be put in a position (i.e. the head) where it can prevent your actual site from loading.

    Even Federated Media has problems from time to time serving ads so we make sure we use their iframe implementation and never put the code in the head.

  10. ImageCo

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    The problem with video comments are numerous

    *watching them requires too much effort
    *leaving them requires too much effort
    *the video quality is usually poor
    *the people that leave them don’t look like movie stars

    The only videos most geeks are interested in watching contain boobs.

  11. Jacob Burke

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    If you had gone with the Viddler video commenting plugin, then you would not have had this problem. They let people know if things like this are going to happen. Sounds like Seesmic doesn’t have their act together.

  12. Matthew Maroon

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

    @DaveS: Scaling isn’t a function of money allocation. You don’t just buy more or more expensive servers and then everything is hunky dory.

    These are the sort of growing pains that any young startup doing well expects to happen. They just should have handled it better.

  13. Lcx

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

    “Celebrities are starting to take notice of Seesmic, a “Twitter for video” service that lets people have asynchronous video conversations on the fly”

    Well, it seems to me that only you and Loic talk about Seesmic actually. Plus, the alpha testing period never comes to an end and all this hype on TechCrunch about an incomplete service like Seesmic is becoming boring. There are so many others microvideoblogging services that works better. Use one of those.

  14. Someone

    May 17th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

    One of my sites makes approx 450 Seesmic video comments per day. It’s nearly brought down my dedicated server three times this week. They should at least provide a local copy of the swf files (there’s 4 of them linked in the javascript file) so I can run everything locally.

    Video comments isn’t for everyone, but there’s some people who depend on it, believe it or not.

  15. John Minnihan

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    A heartbeat checker would be a useful means to prevent this. First thing the plugin does is check heartbeat: 1 second or less round-trip. Place in a timer; if heartbeat doesn’t come back in X seconds, disable the plugin for 30 minutes & then check back.

    Easy to implement, less than 15 minutes of coding.

  16. Jahbuh

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    Funny, you called them “the Twitter for Video” and the site went down and took yours with it.

  17. Michael Arrington

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    jahbuh - hah. good point.

  18. Daniel Brusilovsky

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    I still support Seesmic, because the community is what keeps it together.

  19. Loic

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    Michael is pissed, i don’t agree with all of his facts but there was clearly a slight communication breakdown, i wish he had handled this privately, but our goal is to not have it happen again.

  20. Gavin Schulz

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    Grats to Michael to putting aside his insider ties, and reporting news objectively, and unbiased. Recently you have really reinstilled my confidence in TechCrunch.

  21. Calvin

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

    I am going to have to agree with DaveS. Video comments aren’t being used and when they are, they aren’t adding to the conversation. Why? Because you can’t skim-read video comments. You have to be interested enough to click the video to start, which I am almost never going to do, unless I already know the author of the comment. If I see a page full of video comments, I am not going to click on any of them. If I see a page full of text comments, I will scan the text looking for anything that interests me. One way to fix the problem and still use video comments would be to have a transcript of the video for the first two sentences or so. Right now, the only context I get is some dude staring at a webcam. Not enough to interest me.

  22. Michael Arrington

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Gavin - I’m not sure why you would have ever lost confidence. I’ve trashed investments before when they deserved it.

  23. Mike Koss

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    The bar’s pretty high for building a widget to be installed on high-volume websites. Serving Widgets is arguably more demanding that serving a web 2.0 web site as you have to prepare for spikes in demand that are unrelated to the traffic on your own site.

    Anyone contemplating widget deployment should be:

    - Using a CDN for delivering their JavaScript files.
    - Use a two-phase loading strategy - a fast 1st phase that gets the widget placed on the page and allows for subsequent layout to be calculated by the browser, and a 2nd data-loading (JSON/AJAX) stage that occurs after the host page has completed loading.
    - Agressive caching of Widget content and any JSON calls to their servers.

    This way, if your Widget servers go down, you only have a blank widget on the page, you don’t crash the host page itself. An example of a widget that uses these techniques is at: http://faves.com/widget.

  24. gia

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

    DaveS said :”Oh wow… what an epic fail. Seesmic should have put all that money they spent on these marketing promotions on better servers and a better product.

    Horrible mismanagement.”

    Seesmic didn’t pay for the Indiana Jones promotion. It was organised with Paramount by a Seesmic user (@dannyboy) who works in online film promotion. I spoke to the actors - again I work in online film promotion and am a Seesmic user (@giagia). And the whole thing was being ‘reported’ on by another Seesmic user (@Sizemore) who also works in online film promotino. This was done BY Seesmic users, for the Seesmic community.

    Seesmic was NOT permitted to say anything about the possibility of the interviews happening. There was every possibility that the whole thing would fall through at the last minute as so many of these things do. There was every possibility that none of the filmmakers would have WANTED to do something which, for them, was so unusual.

    We are trying to find new ways of using Seesmic. That’s all.

  25. alan p

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:39 pm

    Can an interactive video site drive long term traffic via celebrity broadcasting? Some thoughts here:

    http://broadstuff.com/archives.....tions.html

  26. Randolph Richards

    May 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    The only similarity Seesmic has with Twitter seems to be its lack of stability. Otherwise calling Seesmic the “video Twitter” makes no sense. Twitter is simple, seesmic is a mess. Twitter is about updates and status, Seesmic is about a “conversation”. Twitter is fast and 140 characters, Seesmic is boring and limitless.

    I’ll admit the interviews were a nice coup, but they could have been done on youtube, live.yahoo.com, ustream, or even better kyte.

    So let’s stop calling Seesmic the video Twitter. It really doesn’t make sense.

    Thanks for writing post Michael.

  27. art minkle

    May 17th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    “Celebrities are starting to take notice of Seesmic, a “Twitter for video” service that lets people have asynchronous video conversations on the fly”

    Actually it’s the PR department for Indiana Jones that made a deal with Seesmic. Still pretty cool, posting celeb vids directly, but frankly the same videos probably went to Youtube, Veoh, and others. I’ll bet you a free promotional post on Techcrunch that Cate Blanchette or Steven Spielberg or others on your list didn’t make their own Seesmic accounts and have no intention of ever going back to login to Seesmic with the PR company-made account.

    You have totally overstated what is going on here, contributing to the hype of a company that is basically just Youtube, mixed with a French accent and the video comment embed tool for blogs.

  28. Joe Stump

    May 17th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

    The problem is that they didn’t put up a catch-all down page that 404’s. Pretty easy to do if they’ve got a firewall/load balancer out front. The problem is they were bringing the sites down without doing that, which results in standard timeouts to go into effect. If it was responding immediately with a 500 or similar error no sites would have been brought down.

    Also, technically, they didn’t bring down TechCrunch. I’m sure your servers were just fine; it’s just that the browsers were hanging on an external entity in the header.

  29. Doug

    May 17th, 2008 at 2:31 pm

    C’mon loic, “our goal is never to have this happen again”? Could that sounds more wishy-washy? Why not tell us about your aims, or ambitions? I think publicly downing a popular (allbeit niche) website so badly I’d expect a good deal more contrition.

    And Mike, cmon! Basic html 101, dont let your site die on external javascript, sheesh

  30. Chris

    May 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

    Force a hostile take over Arrington. Show them your financial might!
    Crush them and that frenchman under your fist!~

    Freedom Fries. Freedom Fries Arrington.

  31. ZiZi

    May 17th, 2008 at 2:44 pm

    Yes, Why do you guys call it “video Twitter”? I could never make the connection.

  32. ZiZi

    May 17th, 2008 at 2:44 pm

    Edit: “Twitter for video”

  33. sean percival

    May 17th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    Bummer on the issues, still a great plugin/idea.

    I’m working on version 2 of the mahalodaily blog and we plan to include it.

  34. Kyle MacRae

    May 17th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

    Wow, Loic using a conference, sorry, product to further personal glory, sorry, ambition and not telling anyone in advance no matter what the consequences? Horror, shock.

  35. Wayne Lambright

    May 17th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    I enjoyed seesmic, and would like to see the feature back.

  36. Oran

    May 17th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    Mike’s post has been up for hours, and still no comment from Loic. Seesmic’s PR machine is as stillborn as its plug-in.

  37. JeanHuguesRobert

    May 17th, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    This is actually a major issue. I have a similar (at a much much smaller scale) with some twitter code. Sometimes Twitter does not answer quickly enough and this blocks the rendering of the page for a intolerable amount of time. GogglePages is another service that proved unreliable at times. So I conclude that it is not a matter of size of the provider.

    There is apparently NO solutions. Reliability is not a valued quality anymore.

    We are all running concept cars! Gladly so. And, based on what I observed, kids don’t care about that, it’s a given to them: “Sometimes it does not work, not a big deal”. It is a very different spirit. Older people would just get pissed off and complain.

    Mike, don’t blame Loïc, for he is just in tune with the general current attitude, where things work “good enough”. And don’t expect pro-active apologies from providers, planned disaster never happened so many times, it is reasonable to assume that small glitches will go unnoticed. If they do get noticed, apologize humbly. This is certainly what Loïc will do (or “has done”, by now). That’s the current standard business practice. SNAFU!

  38. Dan

    May 17th, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    Loic should leave a seesmic comment for Mike. Oh sorry he can’t. ;-( Hopefully all the other sites will unload seesmic. What does this mean to seesmic in the longterm? Au Revoir me thinks …

  39. Felix

    May 17th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    Good to see Loic didn’t call Mike an asshole this time.

  40. Marc Fawzi

    May 17th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    Video is a totally different medium than text. But like oil and water, they _can_ be mixed with some hard shaking. However, the resulting French dressing would break up (unless you have stabilizing agents)

    You could do it au natural but you would have to … (to be continued)

    Re: “the Twitter of video”

    http://venturebeat.com/2008/05.....qus_thread

    :)

  41. Andrew

    May 17th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    Without the downtime, Seesmic just wouldn’t be Twitter for video.

  42. Paul Short

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

    This is one of the reasons I rarely install any widgets or other apps that rely on the uptime of an external site - if that site goes down or is slow delivering the code, it can take yours with it. I rarely even embed videos anymore for the same reason.

    BTW Mike, the commenting button and pagination links are kinda screwed up below now that the Seesmic link is removed. I’m on the latest stable Firefox on WinXP right now and here’s a link to a screenshot - http://www.paulshort.com/techcrunch-oops.png

  43. John

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    #9 points out the fix, iframes

    You could also put their content at the very bottom of the page so that your content always shows up and then use rewrite the html produced by the script to where you want it after the entire page finishes loading.

  44. Chris

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    He could have been a real jerk and called US immigration on Loic.
    This kind of thing would have never happened again.

  45. Charlie

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    Yeah… real harsh.

    No “Amateur hour at Seesmic” comments?

    Can you honestly say that if it was another company that you weren’t invested in that TOOK DOWN YOUR SITE THREE TIMES, that you wouldn’t have tore them a new one?

  46. Don MacAskill

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:39 pm

    Hey Mike,

    Two things you should do:

    - Convince Seesmic to put their JavaScript on an external CDN so you can get it even when they’re down. The app will still fail, but at least page loads won’t get halted because seesmic.com is down and can’t serve that JS.

    - Load the javascript and fire the events *after* the body is loaded. Moving it to the footer isn’t good enough - do it completely after the page is loaded. Talked to one of your developers the other night, seemed like a smart guy, so he can probably figure it out - but ping me if not, happy to show you how we do it.

    Nice post, btw.

  47. Chris

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

    “Can you honestly say that if it was another company that you weren’t invested in that TOOK DOWN YOUR SITE THREE TIMES, that you wouldn’t have tore them a new one?”

    I also wanna say that the TC developers and sysadmins really suck. I mean they should have been able to resolve the problem within 2 minutes.

    My company can actually manage your blog here in LA with 24 hour support from a real live college degree holding sysadmin or developer.
    It would cost you 6 digits a year, but it would prevent this from happening ever again.

    If TC is really worth 100M, maybe you should call me to find out about our services. Plus LA is a way better place to host out of a datacenter than SF.

    If TC is worth 100M, shouldn’t you invest in some support staff to protect your investment. Kind of like Dolly Parton insured her breasts for damage?
    I have somebody I can fly down to my office that could maintain your blog & server cluster for just, JUST under 6 figures yearly and be on call 24/7. JUST under 6 digits. Like 1 penny.

  48. Loic

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:43 pm

    How we will communicate with partners and users in the future. Comments welcome.

    http://www.loiclemeur.com/engl.....c-wil.html

  49. Dave S (not DaveS)

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Interesting comments here. I don’t know you Mike but I have been around a while.

    The interviews were happening around the 5-7:00AM EST (A very early Saturday morning for what I assume is most of TechCrunches readers). The “Buzz” may have started as early as 2:00AM EST (making sense when you say it happened yesterday).

    Anyway a random result of googling “techcrunch + site +down” (#10 on the results page)
    http://feedcrier.com/content/2007/03/07/crunched/
    Fair opinion on the techcrunch effect on a small site or one with a undiscovered bug.

    Here is the #1 result
    http://www.crunchnotes.com/200.....im-pissed/
    Your own team. Sure there is mention of third party plug-ins at fualt. There is also an admission of techcrunch’s own problems. Fair and Balanced.

    And yeah this post (Don’t Screw Your Partners Over A Marketing Promotion) is at the #2 Spot … way to get traffic Mike!!!

    This reads more like a post designed to generate PR.

    The Seesmic WordPress plug in page where (TechCrunch downloaded from?) has, if I remember correctly a statement about moving a piece of the code to the footer. I do not use WordPress so it was while I was skimming over the article.

    It is also obvious from reading many of the comments that some people intuitively understand Seesmic and can imagine ways to implement it, while others are the equivalent of “flint and tinder” hold outs. Take a look at the footage of the Pope at the World Trade/Ground Zero site. They used a bic lighter!

    And that is how Seesmic will eventually Dominate the market … it is an application that will be used for many things. (for the knuckledraggers light up a smoke, make a camp fire or a Bonfire, lite the candles for a intimate or romantic dinner or a birthday celebration.

    Some knuckleheads commenting obviously are Player Haters, I certainly have read enough people Hating on you in the past. Video is is just starting to move into a mainstream world. The news of 09’s HDTV & Convergence, Mobiles and a few other things that will be happening in the very near future must not be making it’s way to the cave dwelling readers.

    My opinion. Seesmic is a wise investment. Anytime you are thinking of just tossing your interest out … throw it my way.

    And a big nod of respect for speaking your mind. Even if it does read like a PR
    stunt that has more in common with shooting yourself in the foot so you can strut like a rooster.

    Dave

  50. Chris

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    @46,

    The person that wrote the plugin javascript should have created a connection time out as not to hang roll out deployments.

    That’s basic stuff. I hear they have some MEAN javascript candidates on craigslist.org.

    French version to follow:

    La personne qui a ecrit le plugin javascript aurais du cree un timeout pour la connection, pour pas bloquee les installations.

    C’est tres poche. Je pense que tu pourrais to pongee des developpeurs qualifiee sur le site craigslist.org

    Merci Montreal, let’s play hockey!!!

  51. Chris

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:55 pm

    te pongee.

    L’ostie de Francais. C’est poche. Merrrrrddeeeee…..
    I know I left Quebec for a reason.

  52. Jake Ludington

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    In the long term, sites like TC aren’t where these comments will be big. Seesmic is a mass market product. If the problem isn’t solved for early adopters the real market will go with a reliable solution not Seesmic

  53. Jon K.

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:57 pm

    From Loic’s blog:

    “Here is how I propose to inform our partners and users:

    -status page on seesmic.com, status.seesmic.com coming asap
    -email list that any partner or user can subscribe to and get status updates
    -dedicated twitter account for status updates
    -warn hours in advance in case of planned maintenance
    ”

    I wouldn’t use “dedicated” and “Twitter” in the same sentence again, no matter the context.

    Loic, perhaps you can help me understand… why is it that Seesmic took venture capital? In my own opinion, if you’re confident in your concept and have the bank account to build it, you should. I’m fairly sure you have the connections to make the strategic advantages of taking VC a non-issue, so why not bankroll the company yourself?

  54. Chris

    May 17th, 2008 at 6:09 pm

    “I’m fairly sure you have the connections to make the strategic advantages of taking VC a non-issue, so why not bankroll the company yourself”

    I’m so tempted. If you’re selling to a large corp, say CNET just for example. Then the exec interested asks who owns it, and the person on the other side says, some guy named Loic, yeah, he was real big in FRANCE.

    Can you imagine? I imagine that’s the reason. I could be wrong.

    For a couple hundred grand ok, but not for a huge mutli-million dollar acquisition. It’s the same reason I have to go meet VC.

  55. Steve J

    May 17th, 2008 at 6:27 pm

    I don’t think Seesmic offers any proper network architecture. They are hosted on shared servers, no redundancy, no web balancing, it looks like a puzzle with broken pieces.
    You don’t get into live stream video sharing platform without planning your needs ahead.
    Who is Seesmic’s network administrator? Loic is CEO/CMO/CFO/CTO? How much buzz can you create around Seesmic?
    That’s the difference between Youtube and Seesmic.

    As soon as YouTube will get into the video blogging market - Seesmic will be dead.

  56. Gleb

    May 17th, 2008 at 6:30 pm

    I don’t see a problem when Techcrunch writes or promotes anything what they like as soon as we (readers) know why.

    As for the JavaScript thing…
    It’s like 1st grade lesson. Ads or anything shouldn’t be served via javascript untill you own a network like google does that has connection speeds and redundancy higher then all the other sites on the web. I don’t see it as seesmic problem, any site can go down unless you own datacenters across the globe.

  57. Suni

    May 17th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

    Mike you are so full of it. This “Harsh” criticism is no more than a plug/PR drive for one of your investments that doesn’t deserve cover if you were applying any objective criteria which you don’t.

    You are tarnishing your brand and you don’t seem to get it, perhaps just get your buddy Scoble to write something to spark a “hot” debate, wow that would be something original and special… just so stage managed.

    All kudos for you having a go at the investing side, but your track record - how should we put it - stinks.

  58. Gleb

    May 17th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

    @ Steve J
    > That’s the difference between Youtube and Seesmic.

    Youtube videos are unacessible regulary.
    Serving huge ammounts of data with small profitability per Mbps and 99.99% uptime don’t fit together. When you have a site that has huge traffic costs you buy the bandwich that is cheap or you don’t survive.

  59. TC Crit

    May 17th, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    You’re so unbiased! Washington Post should definitely syndicate you!

  60. Loic

    May 17th, 2008 at 7:28 pm

    by the way not that it excuses any of our short downtimes yesterday but please feel free to check GetSatisfaction where Seesmic is one of the most active companies there. There is not a single complaint about downtime, and trust me, they would have showed up there:

    http://getsatisfaction.com/seesmic

    again, this does not excuse us and I will communicate better. But please check how we are responsive in getsatisfaction it will give you an idea of how we care.

  61. Soren Macbeth

    May 17th, 2008 at 7:39 pm

    Sorry, but Spielberg and Indiana Jones on Seesmic is much more interesting then the fact that TechCrunch was down for a few minutes a couple of times.

    Way to take a great opportunity to positively talk up a company which you have a small investment in and turn it into a boring public whine about some downtime.

  62. Mike Abundo

    May 17th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    Don’t you just hate it when companies diss bloggers in favor of Hollywood celebs? That’s old media thinking right there.

  63. golfgirl

    May 17th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    Loic is awesome, and everyone knows it.

    Seesmic rocks too, by the way. At least for real people types…maybe not so much for uber geek types. Oh well…

  64. Jeremy Chone

    May 17th, 2008 at 8:18 pm

    While I agree with Michael on what Seesmic should have done, I think that web applications (web sites, blogs, …) should be more resilient to 3rd party [startup] plugins.

  65. MK

    May 17th, 2008 at 9:16 pm

    “The fact that I invested in them means I need to be careful before giving them any kind of break.”

    Hmm.. I do see that you are being very careful every time you give them a break.

  66. Gubbi

    May 17th, 2008 at 9:28 pm

    Michael is just pissed about not getting wind about the Celebrity promotions.
    And whats curious is he uses every opportunity he gets to trash Seesmic, to show he is unbiased. See Alert Thingy posts, twitter msgs to Loic and now this.

    Looks like Seesmic took a great risk by taking investments from Mike. They should just try pitching his staff for a post here, nothing more.

  67. Gubbi

    May 17th, 2008 at 9:31 pm

    And yes, I think it’s TC’s fault that they don’t make sure 3rd party plugins are loaded in a fault tolerant way.

  68. pete

    May 17th, 2008 at 10:46 pm

    All I see here is Michael making assumptions and no facts. Do you know he knew? Where is your proof? IS he not friend enough to give him the benefit of the doubt? Hosting their new technology puts risk on your part too to put all the blame elsewhere. To do this to a friend in public for your little gain is what I am starting to expect from a guy in his 30s or 40s, who acts like he is 17 and a nerd God.

    I re-read the title of this post and think, maybe it is Loic who was saying it to Michael, because of your logic you’ve screwed him over by acting like a 17 year old and not acting like a man and going straight to him. Very shallow.

  69. liza

    May 17th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    good for you, bravo.

    i don’t take this as calling them out as much
    as reminding them of customer service.

    bravo, indeed.

  70. pete

    May 17th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

    Loic, nice replies, and thanks for being the bigger man. A person’s character can be tested in times like these; it’s nice to discover two today. It’ll be interesting what investors think of Micheal’s comments.

    Micheal, just because you are hurt you didn’t get to release it first, doesn’t mean you act this way. Take some time to reflect on what this business is making you become when you put ‘the scoop’ before friends. Scoops come and go, friends will just go.

    /note to self
    Don’t let Michael invest in any of my businesses, because if there is a hic-up he’ll add insult to injury and cause people to leave.

  71. Andy

    May 17th, 2008 at 11:01 pm

    If we leave all the issues with placing external links on pages that you are dependent on, I have to wonder about the infrastructure that seesmic is using. It seems to me, and this is coming from an engineering background rather than a management background, that the first thing that you should have worried about was the backend, not the promotions. For a site that is serving heavy content (video), you have to know that you will get slammed. And you should have not only built out to prevent that, but also load tested your systems to make sure that you could handle it when it happened. To be fair, the sudden load might have come as a complete surprise, but I do doubt that given that seesmic apparently knew that something big was either happening or going to happen.

    I wonder if insuring that your site crashed under load should be part of the definition of web 2.0 (or 3.0 or 2.5 or whatever it’s supposed to be now)?

  72. george w bush

    May 17th, 2008 at 11:05 pm

    ok, most of you must have peanuts for brains. There is no such thing as bad press. Is it a coincidence that he making this post after being called out again by WIRED.

    Most of you feed into this crap about Mike being objective, come on. Look I have nothing against the guy, but there is a saying that goes like this, “a fisherman never says his fish is smelly”.

    Mike is a smart guy who knows his audience and how to manipulate most of you. Good job on this one Mike, my hat off to you. But the fact still remain, this was purely a publicity stunt, orchestrated to show that you objective.

    Don’t get me wrong i read your blog for amusement and this particular post is quite funny.

  73. Joe Hunkins

    May 17th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

    So much for me feeling bad that I missed the big event. Remaining skeptical of prospects for this type of chat vis a vis twitter.

  74. alex k

    May 17th, 2008 at 11:23 pm

    @george w bush
    what you just said is moronic. if mike didn’t bring this up you would be the 1rst person to say “hey guys look, mike didn’t talk about this, he’s completely biased in his posts”.
    so in either cases, you could just accuse him of something (being biased or doing self publicity).

  75. Nico

    May 18th, 2008 at 12:33 am

    most people wouldn’t have noticed the marketing efforts on seesmic’s behalf or the downtime if Arrington hadn’t blogged about it. So while being annoyed by the downtime, he also raised awareness for seesmic a bit, as >70 comments clearly show.

  76. Rodney Rumford

    May 18th, 2008 at 12:47 am

    Mike,
    The fact that you called them out speaks volumes to your credibility. What I really liked is that you told what they should have done. Most people don’t offer suggestions for improvement; it is just easier to bitch.

    I understand your frustration with plugins brining down sites (we had the same issue with a twitter plugin recently).

    I hope Seesmic get’s it fixed soon and video comments come back to techcrunch soon. I really like the dimension it brings to techcrunch.

    As we twittered about earlier this morning, I was was wondering why Seesmic was gone as I was all ready to launch into my first video comment and had my notes all ready. ;)

    Cheers!

    Rodney Rumford
    http://www.facereviews.com

  77. COP

    May 18th, 2008 at 2:03 am

    Veto Corleone: Hey Mikey, never discuss business at the dinner table and never take the inside family problems to the outside world. UNDERSTUD?

  78. AK

    May 18th, 2008 at 3:21 am

    Who knows, maybe Seesmic did slip up. Unfortunately, your way of handling the situation is making you come across and childish and whiny. Too bad. Retaliating with immaturity is never a way to solve a problem. Just as they should have consulted you beforehand, it was your turn to set the example by talking to them privately.

    Its amazing how even professional blogs can remind me of the middle-school online gossip diaries from years ago.

  79. Otir

    May 18th, 2008 at 4:11 am

    Gia confirms how the happening was organized unbeknownst of Loïc here :

    http://seesmic.com/v/sOHtUvDDVL

  80. Bob L'Eponge

    May 18th, 2008 at 4:20 am

    what if this is just a way for Techcrunch to remove the frankly bit shit vommenting system without Mike having to admit that Seesmic vomment aren’t appropriate or handy for Techcrunch, one of the leading blogs on the Web? If he did that, wouldn’t that be much, much worse PR for his investment than ‘anger’ at it causing easily removed, temporary technical problems with his site, which most people will go ‘oh, that can be resolved in future - this is what you get with alpha software’

  81. tejaswi

    May 18th, 2008 at 4:57 am

    sometimes i get this feeling that tech crunch is a school for start-ups :). good job mikey !

  82. Fred Grott

    May 18th, 2008 at 5:08 am

    Someone needs to do an ad:

    Michael Arrington’s Investor Feedback, the best feedback you ever pay for..

    I hope someday soon to have the honor to pay for such forthright and honest feedback form high caliber investors such as Micheal Arrington in my start-up.

    Keep up the good work..shareme

  83. Brice

    May 18th, 2008 at 5:30 am

    Don’t you thing it’s much more harder to create a start-up, rise funds, develop technologies & business, >>MAKE SPIELBERG &CO USE YOUR SERVICE<<… than writing articles on a damned blog?!

    I mean of course it’s disappointing to see his blog going down because of “one-of-those-shit-apps-made-by-so-very-little-start-ups” (excuse me but : are you so important as a blog-writer Mr Arrington? are you a star? have you found a vaccine to fight AIDS? Can’t you be less pretentious please…), of course it’s Seesmic’s fault and not yours, but I personally thing you should have try to resolve this - let’s face it “little” - problem in private as it was the very first time Seesmic had a real bug.

    And if Seesmic doesn’t do anything correct to make things going better, then you are - as an investor - a good representative to make things public and give advices…

  84. Ben

    May 18th, 2008 at 6:44 am

    “I understand that young startups need a little wiggle room to get things right, and I don’t mind testing that raw software on TechCrunch. Even if that means we go down occasionally during their growing pains.”

    Hmmm… that should be rephrased a little to “I don’t mind testing raw software on TechCrunch that I’ve invested in and will hopefully end up profiting on later”

    I really doubt you would put up young software that has the potential to take down your entire site that you don’t have financial interest in, especially considering how much you blast people for downtime.

  85. Wolke Snow

    May 18th, 2008 at 7:58 am

    This little drama 2.0 sounds like a typical commercial radio script:

    - Morningshow host (supposedly) does something bad to his CEO.
    - CEO (supposedly) is offended and (supposedly) fires morningshow host.
    - Fake callers want morningshow host back.
    - … drama develops… including other media owned by the same publisher
    - Station makes a (fake or not) telephone poll -> Users want host back.
    - CEO retracts the (fake) termination of the show host.

    Substitute /morningshow host/ with /Seesmic/ and /CEO/ with /Arrington/.
    Way too easily comprehensible…

    The only thing missing is asking voters to pay 99 cents per call.
    (That’s the usual fee in Paris and elsewhere in Europe for these PR ‘jokes’).
    If you manage to do that on the Internet, you deserve to become TIME droid of the year.

    With stuff like this, radio has become the least attractive of old media.
    Arrington, you better sell fast to Fox — or Clear Channel will be the only one left.

  86. Azzam

    May 18th, 2008 at 11:08 am

    It amazing that a web startup is able to leverage this kind of PR for their service by attracting such personalities who frankly are wanting to get into the Internet scene to promote Movies.
    I bet spielberg, lucas are not fully upto scratch on this scene and jumped at the opportunity, others who have better been able to use this kind of PR would have used other services for PR.

    You would have thought at the least the platform for video uploading quality would have been mastered by now, but the quality is appauling.

    I noticed that they used top of the line of the video recording equipment when they did the interviews, and with a software under $100 would have converted these videos into the smallest appropiate files for seesmic but with the best quality for the video player size. The sound quality seems very good, but you expected more.

  87. Janice

    May 18th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    I need website traffic, and figured this might be a good forum to get ideas.

  88. Jeremy McAnally

    May 18th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    Seems to me you should give them the same courtesy you want from them…

    Did you tell them you were dropping them and give them a chance to fix it? Or tell them you were running this story before you ran it?

  89. kenobi

    May 19th, 2008 at 5:25 am

    Jemima Kiss of Media Guardian asked Spielberg a question in her pyjamas, then blogged about it. Is that media manipulation / traffic driving?

  90. Fat Man Collective

    May 27th, 2008 at 9:33 am

    Oh my Ninja Cat Friend, I trusted you and now I see you are lured by glitzy leather whip vendors and have fallen victim to the Mikedom of the Crystal Crunch.

    Your interface may be as fashionable, and less practical as a pudding bowl haircut but I still love your shiny headed enthusiasm.

  91. John Smith

    June 5th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    May be evolving through video scenes and I remain very slight defect that these are scenes must be subjected to load may be under suspension and also very slow??!!
    Why not become a precondition FPS video and Pak can even download the normal work normally and intermittent example?!!
    I mentioned the company in a new way above the target.but did not specify which or what manner and disadvantages of the foundation. Is it possible that these are changing the way video mode forever!!
    Many had believed that the piece is possible.I set time to time, such as these are Alakavar extends long I hope that soon we see the best solutions for digital media video on the Internet
    Thank you very much, however sincere appreciation

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