Robert Scoble. Blame FriendFeed. Steve Rubel. Blame FriendFeed. The Shel puppet. Blame FriendFeed. Dave Winer. Blame FriendFeed. Etc.
FriendFeed is a parasite service built on the back of Twitter. Let’s get this straight. No Twitter, no FriendFeed. Want to kill FriendFeed, as I certainly do? Cut off its oxygen. Take a page from Facebook’s incompetent UnFriend Connect gambit and refuse to pass Twitter posts through non-compliant ex-Google engineering scams.
OK, I’m way off my meds since the company has finally admitted on the Twitter Excuse page that they’ve figured out what the culprit is in the continual service meltdown. It’s the Track command, which as a result of my no-@-sign campaign to evangelize the Twitter XMPP Gtalk gateway, has now reached enough adopters to qualify as an actual threat to Twitter’s massive server farm or whatever access to Fred Wilson’s credit card and an EC2 account buys.
We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.
We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.
Thanks for your patience!Update: We’re turning off IM services for the evening (Friday) to allow for the system to recover. We hope to turn things back on Saturday.
In other words, an errant API project sucking Track clouds out of the Twitter core finally reached the critical mass necessary to hip Jack, whoever that is, to the reality that without the XMPP real time gateway, Twitter could just as well be FriendFeed without the siloed conversation spamyards. Further, Twitter engineers are working to minimize slowness and error pages by turning off the only distinguishing, disruptive, essential part of Twitter until the audience goes away at which point the problem will subside and we can turn it back on on “Saturday.”
Remember: I blame FriendFeed for this, and Robert Scoble, Steve Rubell, Dave Winer, and all the rest of the puppets and ex-Techcrunch analysts who, by appearing to rationally debate the pluses and minuses of FriendFeed versus Twitter, suggest FriendFeed even exists in the absence of Twitter. Nik Cubrilovic doesn’t help either with his cogent (except for the Rails part) analysis of Twitter’s scaling problems. Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die) was there a word spoken about the fatal Track bug until Jack hit the Off switch.
Now, in the cool clarity of no pulse whatsoever can we begin to rationally approach a solution. Forgetting that Hillary has shown no indication of processing the similar lack of pulse in her White House aspirations, let’s put the blame for all this squarely on the parasite API suckers and their dark master FriendFeed. Good.
What is FriendFeed anyway? It appears to be an aggregator of all things social. For me that means my Twitter feed - which already is pumped indiscriminately and obliviously through my Facebook status updates - and my blog posts - which have completely ceased since I got sucked into Twitter in the first place. As the puppet says: Fascinating. FriendFeed is Twitter, only slower. Here’s my demo of the difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:
Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.
Ten minutes later….
FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.
FriendFeed value add: A conversation cloud forms around the Sugar Pops meme. Louis Gray is having a pre-release alpha bowl of Open Pops, but Dave Winer (who has just noticed there is no Block command in FriendFeed) is busy discussing the politics of breakfast cereal decentralization in the Why We Need Block for FriendFeed room and does not weigh in here because he blocked me some months ago and doesn’t care what I had for breakfast or any other meal thank you very much. Another comment refers to the Winer tangent, several folks debate whether Sugar Pops are still on the market, and Robert Scoble broadcasts the whole mess back to Twitter as a TinyUrl… 20 minutes later.
By the way, errant API suckstreams reamplify all this with even less coherence than @replies provide, since remember: FriendFeed conversations have no way of pointing at each other with the possible exception of a Twitter link… and around the horn we go again. The new Rooms feature has initiated an ICANN-like squatter crisis where we are all encouraged to grab our names before the puppets get to them, which of course spawns another shitstorm of completely hidden conversations - wait, there’s Bob and Shel’s sequel book title. They better hope Loren is reading this in FriendFeed ten minutes later.
Update: Well, it’s “Saturday” morning now and no real time stream. I’ve been using a nifty combination of Summize and its Realtime results page (click refresh to see 2 new posts, or wait until Summize engineers work out the computer doing the refresh for us thing) and Twhirl, whose point and click @reply feature is a joy to use to send irate messages to Jack, whoever that is. Except I don’t blame Jack. I blame FriendFeed. On Twitter.
So Steve, you’re sitting there with your MacBook-Air watching the comments roll in and laughing your ass off aren’t you?
@51 Steve’s just writing to a very few select, either you get it or you don’t, he doesn’t need to care either way.
Read his stuff a few times, often there’s messages in the message.
Steve,
I’m not alone. This post is nearly incomprehensible to all but a small inner circle who can decode the context and jargon you’re using.
Learn to write for the general TechCrunch audience, which is geeky, but can’t understand your technical and personal references without some background. Maybe if I went to some older posts of yours I’d get more from this - but it’s your job to write a comprehensible stand-alone article.
How’s PodTech.net doing, Steve?
“In other words, an errant API project sucking Track clouds out of the Twitter core finally reached the critical mass necessary to hip Jack, whoever that is, to the reality that without the XMPP real time gateway, Twitter could just as well be FriendFeed without the siloed conversation spamyards.”
You should be fired for writing that sentence. Seriously.
Twitter and Friendfeed are both spam.
I personaly don’t care what someone had for breakfast, sorry Michael, if I did I’d ask. Both of these services serve just two purposes. #1 - they allow Techcrunch like sites pull in more visitors and #2 - they allow regular folk to waste hours thinking their mingling with Techcrunch like site owners.
Sorry, I suppose that this comment will lower my chance of ever getting linked from Techcrunch to.. hmmm , zero but hey, it was zero before :p
#34, Matt - Actually, what my company does or does not do is irrelevant as this was my opinion being expressed. And I said I was involved because I wrote for techcrunch for quite a while. I know you don’t want to sound like a douche, but you kinda did. I was being honest when I said this post was lame. I told Steve and Mike the same thing right after posting.
In case anyone cares about what folks on FriendFeed are saying about this post:
http://friendfeed.com/e/cf6b48.....3048343a40
I find it refreshing for a blogger to state that they don’t know Jack…
Clueless Pundit Steve says:
“ignore the fact that Twitter can stop decentralization by failing to fix the XMPP gateway. Today it’s just a technical issue; tomorrow a licensing one.”
This just goes to show you how narrow TC writers viewpoints are, first by placing way too much importance on Twitter and FF, and secondly, by assuming that any possible decentralized competitor/replacement service would have to somehow interoperate with Twitter or treat it as a hub.
I hope you didn’t invest in Twitter.
Based on the TC article “FF Still Has Some Killing to Do”, it looks like FF’s entire active user base has commented on this article!
who let the old man out again?
Wow. Wrong side of bed this morning huh!
“Blame FriendFeed” - bulls**t! If Twitter makes and opens up an API that then breaks Twitter, don’t point the finger at the users of that API, BLAME TWITTER and their shitty infrastructure and scaling.
“No Twitter No FriendFeed” - please. Friendfeed is much more than a Twitter aggregator - but then you should know that having an account at FriendFeed… As others have already said, the most interesting stuff I see on Friendfeed is NOT the twitter stuff.
@ #58 Gee there is some really intelligent conversation going on over there. It ranks right up there the comments I read on Digg.
@ The Steve Haters: What part of his post is so bad or poorly written? I couldn’t figure out why he was getting negative feedback on his last post either. Do big words and intellectual thoughts scare you? If so then maybe you need to go join the people that are commenting on ff or Digg. That might be more your speed.
what i still don’t understand is why tech blogs can’t realize that no one is actually using twitter besides them. i consider a certain subset of my friends to be pretty early adopters. only one of them is on twitter, and doesn’t post anymore bc he’s realized its basically useless.
I’ve hosed two twitter accounts. I’m on my third now.
FF was a neat start but I don’t need to sit through the rest of the movie.
Gillmor, you are a horrible writer. This post, like all of your others, is meaningless dreck.
Worse than you, though, are your pseudo-intellectual fanboys who think that if a piece of writing is hard to decipher then it must contain deep meanings and that to criticize it is to expose oneself as a philistine.
Worst of all, though, is Arrington, to have lost his bullshit detector, or perhaps his spine by being unwilling to admit his mistake and pull the plug on your brief yet torturous TechCrunch tenure.
Open your eyes, people! Emperor Gillmor has no clothes!
Was this post written by Thomas Pynchon?
67 What does the J stand for?
Today I removed my Twitter feed from Friendfeed, so it’s only blogs, flickr/picasa, video, youtube and uh, google shared items. That’s it, pretty much.
Why in the hell did Jaiku have all this functionality and people whined ‘oh but i liiiiike that twitter is so simple’? Simple, sure, and contributing to our collective retardation? Totally. Everyone who hated the model of Jaiku having inline importing and the ability to hide/unsub from *part* of a person; yet is now busting out the pom poms on Friendfeed, is a damn hypocrite– er, ‘changed their mind’ perhaps.
I hope spacebook buys it just to piss off the webtech blogosphere. At least we know we can have a huge audience. So delightful.
I understood the post. Gillmor’s not a bad writer. The bad writers are the ones that puke hyperbole into every. single. fucking. thing. on the god damn Internet.
Examples:
Is TechCrunch the next Google?
Facebook is the next killer search app.
MySpace is filled with pedophiles that want to RAPE your children while PILLAGING your ice cream from your FREEZER!
Insert Complete and Utter Bullshit Scare Statement Here: Is Blank the Blank 2.0?
Anything Rob Scoble does or has said in the last 6 months.
I guess I have to make amends for the tone in my comment way up there in #30. It’s not that the article is bullshit (although it is cryptic), but that this topic is tiring - I long for the day where I don’t get to eat 10 twitter stories in a row in my newsreader.
I wish we could just get everyone with a real opinion on this matter in a cage fighting this whole thing off. Maybe we’d get these people off of twitter for just enough time for it to come up for air.
So, apologies where they’re due. Now bring me the head of whoever’s to blame for this twitter mess.
This link is why FriendFeed rocks. I still consider Twitter one of the most useful services ever built and have never really considered FriendFeed as similar to Twitter.
The part that gets me is how insular the tech community can be, and frankly, of limited vision and understanding.
Finally someone says it like it is!
Yea, whatever the narrative style, I kinda of agree with the writer and a few other commenters, Friendfeed isn’t that great after all. The system is too basic and attention-consuming. And it doesn’t solve the problem of online socialization overload (As the writer says, the overload actually doubles).
Grr… Whose idea was it that Gilmor should write for TC ?
oh, man, set this to a drum beat and you have a major rap hit….
In other words, an errant API project sucking Track clouds out of the Twitter core finally reached the critical mass necessary to hip Jack, whoever that is, to the reality that without the XMPP real time gateway, Twitter could just as well be FriendFeed without the siloed conversation spamyards. Further, Twitter engineers are working to minimize slowness and error pages by turning off the only distinguishing, disruptive, essential part of Twitter until the audience goes away at which point the problem will subside and we can turn it back on on “Saturday.”
turn it back on on saturday
turn it back on on saturday
turn it back on on saturday
let me show this more clearly…
turning off the only
distinguishing
disruptive
essential part of twitter
until the audience goes away
at which point
the problem will subside
and we can turn it back on
turn it back on on saturday
and the slow angelic chorus for counterpoint …
working to minimze slloooooooooooowwwwness
prashant, you are so wrong… this is fabulous writing, really taking the mickey out of the scene, and laughing at yourself is a mark of maturity, and irony and sarcasm displayed so warm heartedly… it is just fabulous… now i look forward to the tech crunch weekend gillmour update
Almost like saying, Google was living on Yahoo.. no Yahoo, no Google…
Which might be true.
But that’s history.
Meaning, FriendFeed living on Twitter, soon history — just how soon…
If FriendFeed is so bad,why it’s a subject of much controversy
In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey,
butane in my veins so I’m out to get the junkie
with the plastic eyeballs, spraypaint the vegetables,
dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose,
kill the headlights and put it in neutral,
stockcar flaming with a loser in the cruise control,
baby’s in Reno with the vitamin D,
got a couple of couches, sleep on the love seat,
someone came sayin’ I’m a saint (I’m insane)
to complain about
a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt,
don’t believe everything that you breathe,
you get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve,
so shave your face with some mace in the dark,
saving all your food stamps for burning down the trailer park,
yo, cut it
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me,
double barrel buckshot,
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me,
forces of evil on a bozo nightmare,
ban all the music with a phony gas chamber
cause one’s got a weasel and others got a flag,
one’s on the pole, shove the other in the bag,
with the rerun shows and cocaine nose job,
the daytime crap of the folk singers slop,
he hung himself with a guitar string,
a slab of turkey neck and it’s hangin’ from a pigeon wing,
I can’t write if ya’ can’t relate,
trade the cash for the beef for the body for the hate,
and my time is a piece of wax, fallen on a termite,
who’s chokin’ on the splinters
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me
get crazy with the cheez-wiz,
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me
drive, by, body pierce
yo bring it on down
Soy
(em llik uoy t’nod yhw os ybab resol a m’I, rodedrep nu yoS)
I’m a driver, I’m a winner
things are gonna’ change I can feel it
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me
I can’t believe it
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me
Sprechen sie deutsch, baby
Soy un perdedor, I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me
You know what I’m sayin’
SG, nice ….
I like Steve’s writing a lot, but I’m not looking for spoon-fed pablum and flame war flintrock. I have to hold my nose and sometimes put on a cleansuit to read it on techcrunch, but it’s worth the trip. Keep up the great writing Steve, I hope you find a better forum for it.
TechCrunch,
Something is really WRONG with the posts lately.
From a cool tech news website it’s becoming a lame tech philosophy website.
Come on guys! So many interesting things happening in the tech world, talking for the 100th time about twitter and ****ing FF isn’t it!!!
67 has a point though. You guys are so hilariously clueless, technically. Spewing tons of incoherent babble isn’t going to make up for the fact that you wouldn’t know XMPP from SMTP if it bit you in the ass.
LOL, so funny.
haha
Friendfeed versus Twitter is the weekend bitchmeme
Stop the insanity. Tomorrow morning go to your neighborhood Starbucks and scream out loud: “Twitter or FriendFeed”? I’ll bet the negative equity of my home that you’ll get blank stares from everyone. Let’s wake up and realize that we are in our own echo chamber here. Neither Twitter nor FF will ever make a dent with the great unwashed. It’s a theoretical debate for the geek squad.
You want a real debate? How about Oprah or Ellen? Try that one out with the Starbuck’s crowd.
Emerging services let you save the feeds of yours or others for as long as you wish, on the free clouds of online storages and online queues…
I recommend walking outside and taking a deep breath. Remember: the world does exist outside of Twitter and Friendfeed. (amen to Don Best/89)
That was one heck of a difficult piece to read - I got halfway through before giving up. Less complicated and smoother reading please
Anyone complaining that Steve should be fired or threatening to stop reading TC stop and think before you post anything. Mike is surely a smart guy and I’m guessing he could rattle off the TC numbers for the last 12 months off the top of his head. Steve’s posts seem to have become a regular weekend gig so what does that tell you?
come on people now
smile on your brother
everybody get together
try to love one another right now
The constant whining about Twitter’s unstableness never ceases to amuse. There is a basic economic law that says: “you get what you pay for”. The expectation that you have 5 Nines uptime for a free service is unrealistic to say the least. Geez, talk about an entitlement mentality.
@70 Right on. Jaiku did Friendfeed many months ago. Google really needs to get Jaiku out of mothballs ASAP with all of Twitter’s downtime.
Heck, even adding some invites for existing Jaiku users would give it a heck of a kick start.
Kenneth LeFebvre (#15) > After all this, I still don’t understand what Steve is trying to say…
Steve is saying that Hillary killed Twitter and Dave Winer is a d*ck.
Oh, and he’s asking his dealer to bring his medication.
I’m not quite sure about the “Jack”metaphor, though.
But I’m glad he needed only 900 words this time!
@Jack was the Twitter staff member who posted the downtime info. Steve’s use of “hip Jack” was a clever cross cultural reference. Somehow it seems less clever when it needs to be explained…
Its always fun to read these posts with your voice in my head. Makes me laugh and I can then read THE WHOLE THING
But Steve, its not friend feeds fault, its your fault for starting the “track” mosh pit and now they have to shut the concert down. Thanks a whole lot. But I have not been on the computer all day, so tweetscan just dropped my tracked keywords into my email to be archived forever in gmail. Missed nothing and I got to mow the lawn, play with the kids, visit with my parents, listen to thursdays gillmor gang, and two other short fiction podcasts.
I think its cool that Loic likes the Freds on FriendFeed