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.