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.
I like Gillmor’s writing for TechCrunch. Much of what he says is way over my head but it’s certainly interesting. Certainly he’s pulling in the readers in as well. This is a top story on Techmeme. The post before this has 43 comments. The post after it 12. This post has over 100. Can’t see how traffic could be a bad thing for Arrington.
I do think it’s only a matter of time though before he comes over to the dark side of FriendFeed.
Sorry, Richard: my bad — I was trying to be funny and there are a number of colloquialisms starting with “Jack” that seemed to fit.
Did you find any proof in Steve’s or Jack’s posts that it is Friendfeed rather than Thwirl or one of the other parasites in the Twitter ecosystem causing the problems? Steve has just taken over Duncan’s and Mike’s role to make sure TechCrunch gets on Bitchmeme every weekend.
More rambling -> more bitching -> more Meme. (And, yes, I’m an idiot for even reading TechCrunch on weekends.)
One skim over the comments here certainly highlights those who take themselves way too seriously over those who actually read what’s written.
Twitter is the event; Friendfeed is the recording you post after the fact.
You can be a participant on Twitter or an observer on Friendfeed. It’s really as simple as that.
Wolke: I’m not sure if Steve’s assertion that FriendFeed is to blame is based on any inside knowledge or just a convenient means to a political end. I didn’t bring it up because I agree with his position re Twitter v FriendFeed however I wouldn’t have thought that FriendFeed even uses the XMPP API. Factoring in the apparent delay in tweets showing up on FriendFeed it seems more likely they are using the HTTP API.
From the comments from Jack it sounds like the problem is actually an error in code their end that has only just now shown up because of increased XMPP use. Seesmic are currently implementing XMPP into Twhirl so my finger is pointed tentatively in their direction.
Ok, so I honestly don’t care about Twitter or what people tweet. I tried the service for a bit and rapidly lost interest. I still find FF incredibly useful for all the other services that it tracks. If anyone’s feed is too tweet-ey, in fact, I hide all those or stop following them on FF. Put another way, they are each independent tools. I’m sorry you don’t understand that Steve, but they are. If you try to use FF like Twitter, then of course it looks like Twitter.
Also, FF almost certainly doesn’t use the Jabber/XMPP API, so assumption one of your rant flies out the window and basically everything else along with it. Even assuming you’re right, your assertion that a performance issue tied to the Twitter API couldn’t possibly be a problem on Twitter’s side is laughably flawed. The Big Bad Wolf (FF) did it! It’s all his fault that my straw house (Twitter performance) couldn’t stand up.
Finally, you REALLY need to write more clearly. I mostly understood what you wrote, but not after re-reading numerous sentences. If you can’t see what’s wrong with this sentence, you need to open a grammar book:
“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.””
This is stuff for a personal blog of a high school student who hasn’t yet taken a class on English writing techniques, not a major tech blog that should ostensibly be reporting news.
Actually, the real final point is that NONE OF THIS MATTERS TO THE REAL WORLD.
>Twitter is the event; Friendfeed is the recording you post after the fact.
I am so happy that all of you people are thinking this. That means we have at least another week of people not cluttering FriendFeed up with opinions that haven’t been thought out or backed up with real understanding.
And the last comment is right. None of this matters.
Oh, and well played Steve Gillmor! That was the best Techmeme, er, FriendFeed, bait I’ve seen in a long time.
Oh #2: I did a little test tonight on Twitter. Took less than 20 seconds to write a Tweet in Twitter, see it in FriendFeed, answer it in FriendFeed, and then see that answer in Twitter and answer it in Twitter. I don’t know where you got the 10 minute round trip, but then Twitter has been down a lot lately, so maybe the API wasn’t working as well as it should have been.
Twtter lets others drink their blood… even after knowing they are aneimic!
Steve, I am kind of surprised to see you harass everyone like this. I can tell you have not used ff enough to understand what you are saying about it. I would recommend that you use it some more before weighing in. At that point, your comments would likely transcend the link-bait value Scoble wot’s of above.
Wow, congratulations on a rant even more incomprehensible than last week’s “Facebook’s Glass Jaw”.
@ 106, you must be a hellaciously amazing typer … lots of practice?
Leechware
Steve you’re a genius. This is the best blog entry I’ve ever read here. Although I unsubscribed from TechCrunch about a year ago, I may be tempted to add it back just for this.
By the way Scoble’s right about the speed of Twits posted to FF. Sometimes they show up on FF even before they show up on Twitter itself. My own experience has been that typically it’s instantaneous. Maybe 2 to 4 seconds from the time I post a twit it shows up in FF. Definitely not 10 minutes. Some services will take that long. For instance, if I fave photos on Flickr. Twitter though is pretty instant.
#34.
“if you can’t understand plain English then you would be wise to keep that fact to yourself next time”
When (tf) did this become plain English????
“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.”
Google buys FriendFeed and FriendFeed sells to Google, put it on the presumably omnipotent Google App Engine, problem solved, just $100m or so — the level Google spent to solve the FeedBurner problem. No?
@115 - that is, in response to friendfeed’s 10-minute delay problem, btw.
The Friendfeed problem illustrated. It is called parallax, and I think is the root cause of why Scoble and Gillmor will never agree.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi.....xample.svg
Obviously the retards cannot recognize a great stream of consciousness when they read it, I bet they love watching puppets tho … fascinating! … indeed.
That post was incomprehensible.
I think TechCrunch loosing it, while posting such junk.
Who needs Twitter in friendfeed?, no one I think.
The comments to this post have run from one polar-opposite end of the
emotional, web-philosophy spectrum to the other and it seems that whatever
rectitude ‘Blame Friendfeed’ merits will remain a hotly-contested issue.
Nevertheless, kudos to you for having the testicular fortitude to take on the esteemed coterie of digital luminaries in the take-no-prisoners manner in
which you did.
i’m sorry - but this is not helping you guys move at all to the broad, non-techie audience that is so highly sought after. i appreciate your effort, steve, and with some research and rereading i’d understand most of it…but that’s not what i’m here to do. i’m here to learn technology + current events, and it’s hard to do both with what you’re writing
This piece is anti-journalism. It is written in a way that if you understand the topic, it makes perfect sense and the cultural references are amusing. If you do not understand what Steve is talking about, you are lost.
I do not claim to be an expert, however I think the underlying problem is APIs that present themselves as push, but are implemented as pull. If you have a pull API and want it to look like push, you have to poll. If you want to be up to the minute you have to poll frequently which can kill the server you are polling.
This problem goes back to RSS, however RSS has a mechanism for saying how often you can poll and be polite.
well, if Web 2.0 is a party (and TechCrunch seemed to prove this from the start) — this is one of the most enjoyable party conversations i’ve read. thank you, Steve, for starting this. so much intellectual fun. and basically you seem to be right too (although i don’t get the techie stuff).
Why don’t all of you get “TWITTER” tattooed on your penis so that when you masturbate you’ll be jerking off to Twitter?
@34 Your own understanding of plain English is tenuous at best. Idiocy and ignorance are not the same thing.
Gillmor makes a valid (albeit trite) point, but he does so in a way that could only be entertaining to a small set of tech news uber-dorks to whom Twitter is tantamount to having a life. Very few people, even among the geeky, are interested in descending to this level of minutiae over what is essentially just a fad in the echo-chamber.
I’m glad your mastery of the subject matter can give your self-esteem a little temporary boost, but most people have better things to do with their lives. Your insecurity and vitriol are irritating and really rather sad. You are the one who should keep your mouth shut.
rofl, I’m going to save Gabe’s bitchslap, for later use against trolls. There should be a Pulitzer for troll flaming.
OMG I was amazed to see which comment Gabe was referring to. Gabe - you are the winner of this year’s Idiot Wind Award. And what, pray tell, are you doing with your time?
As a relative newcomer to this conversation, I must say that the passions are running a bit high for the stakes here in the comments…
I thought this was an interesting piece. It cuts to the heart of open-source project development: services build up in a co-dependent fashion, and if we are judging winners and losers in dollars and cents this has the potential to create tensions if not downright problems.
IMHO, FriendFeed is a step in the right direction but ultimately something more like Flock or Facebook w/twitter integration will dominate because they have more mainstream appeal.
I’m not a fan of “that sucked” comments, they’re transparently self-aggrandizing (ooo, thousands of people will see I thought that sucked!). But really this post made no sense to me, I have to admit.
I will admit, the only reason Steve’s posts make sense to me is because I listen to the Gillmor Gang.
Made no sense at all. Sloppy writing.
Not to digress but man does Seesmic ever suck!
Breathe, man! You crack me up, but breathe!
I’ll breathe when I’m dead
lost me on most of that post. was all over the place
lol the author seems to have issues
I want some of that wacky tobaccy too, Steve.