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.
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
Good. This is a lesson.
Stay objective and cut insider ties.
great news as an investor, bad news as a site owner. I would say that the good out weighs the bad on this one.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
@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.
“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.
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.
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.
Funny, you called them “the Twitter for Video” and the site went down and took yours with it.
jahbuh – hah. good point.
I still support Seesmic, because the community is what keeps it together.
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.
Grats to Michael to putting aside his insider ties, and reporting news objectively, and unbiased. Recently you have really reinstilled my confidence in TechCrunch.
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.
Gavin – I’m not sure why you would have ever lost confidence. I’ve trashed investments before when they deserved it.
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.
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.
Can an interactive video site drive long term traffic via celebrity broadcasting? Some thoughts here:
http://broadstu...oundations.html
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.
“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.
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.
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
Force a hostile take over Arrington. Show them your financial might!
Crush them and that frenchman under your fist!~
Freedom Fries. Freedom Fries Arrington.
Yes, Why do you guys call it “video Twitter”? I could never make the connection.
Edit: “Twitter for video”
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.
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.
I enjoyed seesmic, and would like to see the feature back.
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.
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!
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 …
Good to see Loic didn’t call Mike an asshole this time.
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://ventureb.../#disqus_thread
Without the downtime, Seesmic just wouldn’t be Twitter for video.
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.paul...crunch-oops.png
#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.
He could have been a real jerk and called US immigration on Loic.
This kind of thing would have never happened again.
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?
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.
“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.
How we will communicate with partners and users in the future. Comments welcome.
http://www.loic...eesmic-wil.html
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://feedcrie...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.crun...down-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
@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!!!