Robert Scoble just finished a half hour interview with Twitter Founders Evan Willams and Biz Stone. The two are surprisingly candid about the scaling problems the service has had since, oh, it launched two years ago.
“The fact that people are frustrated is a sign that we built something people care about,” says Williams a few minutes in. I agree, but that’s no way to run a business. Stone also says that Twitter doubled in size in March/April this year.
What does it mean when Scoble says “he has Google Talk”? What does that have to do with Twitter?
Scoble needs to chill “HAHAHAHAH” …. dude
Lets get them to do a Town Hall on Ustream.
http://www.ustream.tv/blog/200.....e-working/
Mike,
Both you and Scoble have a love-hate relationship with twitter…and you know it.
It’s like interviewing a employee that is not preforming to the expectations you wanted, which is partly true. Twitter has money coming out the wazzu, and still they are failing. They are apart of people’s daily lives and they are letting people down.
They need to either shape up or let Kevin Rose buy them out. Twitter is better then this.
People cared about Friendster too. Eventually the frustration level gets to be too much and the herd will move. I’m to that point already.
@David K:
It emans that Scoble interfaces Twitter via Google Talk, which is Google’s IM client that utilizes the XMPP. The only way one can utilize the “Track” feature of Twitter is to go through an XMPP client. You can check out more on Twitter’s site in the FAQ.
One thing that I noticed about this episode is that people are a lot more civil to each other when they are face-to-face. Robert was pretty worked up about this on his blog, on FriendFeed, etc. earlier today but that didn’t come across at all in this face-to-face meeting. This is why major disputes are rarely solved through email or a blog post.
@tommy Thanks for the info. I just tried enabling the GTalk feature on Twitter but I got an error:
XMPP Message Error
Message delivery to twitter@twitter.com failed: (Code 404)
Guess it’s time for a new YouTube video…….
LEAVE TWITTER ALONE!!
LEAVE TWITTER ALONE!!
Scoble seriously needs to cut back on the coffee or something…HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Dude, chill.
David K - the Twitter IM gateway has been down for the past couple of days.
@Mike - Gotcha.
If you are using Twitter to promote yourself or brand — pay for it.
DavidK: “XMPP Message Error
Message delivery to twitter@twitter.com failed: (Code 404)”
Yeah - it’s working about as well as the rest of the service.
Let’s ditch the phone video already.
Very bad video, at least in sound… I can’t here them and Scoble is screaming…
Mike D, I agree with your comment on IM/email vs in person discussions. People tend to puff up their chests and take a very hard line when they can hide behind a keyboard. Scoble backs off his tough guy routine in person. The interview was a good civil discussion about some of the issues. Twitter needs to become more customer centric. It is not enough to say we have pissed a lot of people off so we must have created something people like. Given a stable alternative, Twitter is deadpan and will have nobody to blame but themselves. Raise more money, create a more stable and scalable environment and win. It is theirs to win or lose.
What’s the obsession with qik? Even a cheap/small video camera would be better quality that this.
OK so the site doubled, I would understand if it wasn’t close to a month ago that that happened. I’ve gotten to the stage where i ditch twitter for friendfeed. I understand I’ll just come back in time, whether when friendfeed pisses me off or when I can’t find something to do, but either way I’m giving it a good go
@Martin
It’s Scoble. It’s the latest and greatest. He has to use it.
On a more serious note, Qik does not require any cables, syncing, editing, or delay which is great but you clearly sacrifice quality for those features.
I’ll be the first to say that Scoble is awesome, but lets refrain the insanely loud laughing a bit..
@Martin - No kidding. I don’t mind Qik for impromptu video (e.g. “I just ran into … and thought I’d ask him/her a few questions”) but to plan a meeting with Twitter in advance, drive all the way down there, and then use Qik instead of a higher quality video is just obnoxious. Its not like Scoble doesn’t have other cameras.
Scary interview.
scoble, chill with the laughing, its just too unprofessional. you don’t have to be totally serious, but chill out man, its distracting
not everything is gut-busting hilarious
What?! Ruby isn’t the problem? Dudh, certainly not news to me and I hope that RoR haters are getting the message straight now. As stated, Twitter’s downtime problem is the architecture, always has been, RoR is but one piece of the pie. Interesting that Alex Payne is at the center of both controversy, RoR hating and Scoble flooding, hmmm.
scoble needs to mic the interviewees on channel 1 and mic himself on channel 2 so he can lower channel 2 down when he’s not asking a question. //g
when I woke up this morning I didn’t plan to do this interview. If I did it with other equipment I wouldn’t have been able to get it up so fast.
I think it’s ok that the twitter guys took the ‘get it out there and worry about scaling later’ approach. What’s strange to me is that it took them so much time to realize that they have to do something *after* it turned into a success.
The founders don’t seem to like engineers… maybe that’s twitter’s problem…
I suggest that the A-list twitterers (lets say those with followers greater than 8 thousand) should just move their conversations off of twitter for a month and let these guys at twitter try and resolve technical their problems. If the load that the A-list guys create, lets say on FF does not create problems there, then that will be an interesting point of reference. If the A-list guys choose to come back after a month and and they find that twitter is still broken, then that might be a determining factor for ALL going forward.
Are these Twitter guys making money with this stuff? I think its a great tool, how are they planning to cash out?
The Twitter townhall on Ustream idea is interesting…
I’d watch. Seems to be working great for Digg…
“People cared about Friendster too. Eventually the frustration level gets to be too much and the herd will move. I’m to that point already.”
See this is where you’re wrong. millions of people used friendster. It was mass market.
At most 50K nerds use twitter. Nobody cares about them, or the service. It’s a feature not a product.
Twitter Down Time
people care == can abuse?
Leave Twitter Alone
amen to griffin, just because someone is busy in the sphere, shouldn’t make them a celebrity. i’m sure he realises a huge amount of people will be turning up with qik-enabled phones and he can go back to his PC!
Sounds llike they still feel swamped waiting for their new tech guys to understand how to re-write the system. I bet it’s 4-6 months before they get something super stable.
Happy Weekend Everyone.
Christopher Columbus didn’t exactly know where he was going or what the conditions would be like so he sailed a big well built ship. He didn’t start his voyage in a inflatable pool raft that he would have to repair everyday.
Founders of the world’s most useless service
Who’s the fookin dork that looks like a retard in the video?
It’s like a bunch of smart guys invited the village idiot to the interview.
I don’t know what it is but there is something seriously wrong with that guy. He writes books? His question was stupid too.
..most people are sheep and will jump on anything that they perceive as populare until the next cool thing comes along.
Twitter is a flash in the pan. I predict 1-2yrs from now we’ll all be laughing, except for twiitter users, about how meaningless and waste of time twittering really is…
the advantage of qik is he is now one of the few that can get this story out as it happens, and you can interact with it as it happens.
seehah I’m the fookin dork - what makes you think I’m an idiot?
“the advantage of qik is he is now one of the few that can get this story out” …but HD is more important. Oh, that was three months ago.
Scoble…dude you laugh is scaring the sh#t out of my cat!
scoble laugh
I was introduced to Twitter 18 months ago by an early user. I didn’t ‘get’ it at the time.
When the earthquake hit China I read the stories about Twitter being used to coordinate relief effort, find out if people were safe, etc.. I took another look & liked what I found. I and three friends started Twittering. That was two weeks ago.
Imagine lots of people followed a similar path to mine, add the extra users in the disaster zone and those who were inspired to use Twitter in other crisis situations for whatever reason, and you might have an explanation of why the system began to creak and finally fall over.
If that turns out to be partly true, it can be looked back on as an episode, learned from and factored into future development.
I’d be interested to know if this theory stands up.
great interview …i’ve not used twitter yet but i can relate to these guys .. i’m building some bits online here in the UK and sometimes you just have to get your idea prototyped, launch it then see what the interest is.. keep innovating.. love it!!
scoble - after thinking about this, i agree with some of the commenters. in this case, i think it would have been much better to record this with a proper camera and edit it. you had the interview exclusively, a few hours wouldn’t have hurt you.
have you guys noticed the lack of clean accessible public washrooms in san francisco and valley area?
i’m thinking of starting a service like twitter, where the only conversations will be about clean public washrooms. their locations, their frequency of cleaning, their general cleanliness etc.
I can’t quiet place the name, but i’m thinking I”ll go with something like SHI ttr
beenup2?
If the N95 (or whatever smart phone he’s using) had an extension microphone, the audio quality would be much better. The built-in mic captures the person holding the device … and everyone beyond five feet is about 75 percent lower decibels. That’s the main issue I’ve run into with mine, and the fact you’re relying on a cell network (must be 3G). I love what Qik and Kyte and Nokia and others are doing … just needs time to mesh. Scoble is out on point, taking the first bullets as he’s discovering new stuff. I give him credit for trying new things and trying to get interesting content.
Nokia had some custom extension mics made for Reuters reporters. I’m surprised they’re not pushing them out as fast as they can to video journalists.
Great interview…love it and looking forward to the interview of Zuckerberg
Twitter has become so popular + such a useful tool that it is bad when the site goes down. To me, they are working hard to get the service back up and running, stable.
But reading Mr Scoble’s blog post on “Twitter blames it users” and his friend feed, I think his personal comments on twitter are OTT. Don’t use it if you don’t like it or can’t use it - move off, use something else.
Good to see that despite the founders did talk to Mr Scoble, even after the blog posts.. That shows they do care about users to me - they could easily have ignored that.
I twitter (username:Wavewash) but it hasn’t been a life changing service. My friends (mostly not in the startup/tech scene) don’t use it and that takes a lot of value from it. I do see how it can be great when talking at a conference or coordinating a relief effort. Even those aren’t every day things. Currently I use it to keep up on the startup celebrities. Kevin Rose, Arrington, Scoble and such. So it doesn’t bug me much when it goes down. I’ll just come back in a few days.
@Kimbo - Check this out- These guys are sorta doing what you’re saying. http://www.mizpee.com/
Michael:
>>i think it would have been much better to record this with a proper camera and edit it. you had the interview exclusively, a few hours wouldn’t have hurt you.
One problem. I didn’t know I was going to do this interview until about 30 seconds before I did it. I didn’t have my big camera. My camera guy and producer, Rocky Barbanica, wasn’t with me.
I also didn’t have any sleep the night before, so was very tired, which explains some of the goofy laughing (it gets worse when I’m tired and/or nervous, and here I was both).
I agree it isn’t the best quality, but it still beats not getting the interview at all.
Also, we have two-week leadtimes with our HD camera. Yeah, I could put something to the front of the line, but it would have taken more than a few hours, probably wouldn’t have gotten up until Monday afternoon when the story would have been a lot less interesting.
Scoble, they were totally blaming you, just being diplomatic about it. Listen to the words they said. You are the Fail Whale of Twitter.
Michael: one other reason why I use Qik and a cell phone? Because I had tons of people watching WHILE I DID THE INTERVIEW and who were ASKING THEIR OWN QUESTIONS LIVE (people who leave a comment on Qik.com while I’m broadcasting have their questions show up on my cell phone’s screen while I’m doing an interview). That’s impossible using other technologies and is really important to the kinds of media I want to do. I don’t want to do what CNN does. I want to be two-way/interactive and use the latest Internet-only media types. Qik and Kyte and Flixwagon are the ways I’m going to continue to go for just that reason.
Arrington, Scoble….yawn.
The douchebag wondertwins circle-jerking again about a service nobody but twats cares about.
GTFO already.
Bite me: yeah, no one cares about Twitter, right? Then explain why I’m seeing a new Twitter message on http://www.twittervision.com every second. Got it.
@Jimmy Dell, you are incorrect. We “all” are that whale…
@Scoble: Oooh, a message every second. Wow, that must be really active.
Wait, let’s do some math:
60 * 60 * 24 = 86400 seconds in a day
average user twats 10 messages/day (to be generous, Scoble does probably 666/day)
86400 / 10 = 8640 users/day.
HOLY SHIT, that’s one active site.
Scoble, you’re too stupid to cover technology. GTFO already.
Bite me: most users of Twitter do one Tweet per day. Nice try. Also, TwitterVision doesn’t show all Tweets, only a random sample.
Quick survey poll: in the upcoming movie about Scoble’s indefatigable journalistic career, who do you think should play him?
I offer Phillip Seymour Hoffman after he gets wanged on the head with a 2×4 about fifty times and a frontal lobotomy.
twitter guys are idiots just from me listening to this piece
i wouldnt be surprises if those guys stole those code like fb loser
the reason they are problems scaling it is because they probably stole code
c’mon, nobody really calls themselves ‘Biz’, do they?
really?
@Peter: Of course they do. Take Biz Markie for example.
And he’s about as innovative as twitter is, and equally important to us all.
Check out Sazell.com
@AF/Biz: Is this how it goes?
Biz: Hi. My name is Biz.
Normal person: Later.
Why not just use Noisewater (www.noisewater.net) some bloke built it on Google’s new app engine, and it seems to be in its early stages, but hey thats why twitter’s frustrating me has led to.
Congrats to Ev and Biz. You clearly have a grip on the problem, and you’ll eventually, bit by bit, fix the bottlenecks. Twitter is cool.
Scobel and his sidekick, OTOH, just point out how easy it is to conduct a shitty interview. Full of interruptions and platitudes (”have you thought about opening it up to the community?”) it was entirely painful.
<>
In all the talk about the, “douchebag wondertwins circle-jerking again about a service nobody but twats cares about.” (which I did find quite funny btw) this gem seems to have been lost.
Robert, note to self, buy another HD camera. Or cameras.
-Sean
I’ve talked some smack in the past about the RoR thing with Twitter, mostly because the RoR podcast folks take jabs at other languages like PHP for no productive reason and come across as elitist bastards..
But I kinda feel bad for the Twitter guys now. I really don’t think they ever planned for it to take off quite like it has, so they didn’t set out to design it for that scale of user base..
I like Twitter (and Pownce too), and will continue to use Twitter, even with the occasional down-time.. I know that if any of my own sites suddenly started to get 10’s of millions of page views per day my database would fall over and cry uncle too.. So who am I to bitch about a little downtime. I hereby apologize to the Twitter guys for any smack I posted previously.
IT would take one day to design a page for newbies , to explain what Twitter is (not what you think)… Some quick re-design (just html, not even code) would go a long way… not smart.
http://www.afpr.com/2008/08/wi.....nd-up.html
it is very good thank you