mikepk

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I know Twitter’s been having problems, but lately we’ve been hoping to build some twitter services. Unfortunately due to their issues, we’ve been denied access to the twitter jabber stream we were hoping to build on. In the interim I’ve been playing with Summize, it’s a pretty nice search engine for Twitter. They return data in a few formats, so I’m playing with their JSON return seeing what I can get out of it. Here’s showing a search for various political terms including the DNC, Obama, Hilary, McCain and a few others.

Temporarily disabled.

It’s nice to have a new blog where I can throw together little experiments. I just changed my stream integrator around a bit so I thought I’d test it again. One of my streams is “Apple News”, so this list should be an up to the hour river-of-news, updated from my favorite Apple news sources.

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I may have to eat my words about Twitter surviving its current troubles. I’ve been surprised how often I’ve seen this screen over the past couple of days. If a service is down more often than it’s up, I wonder if we’ll see the tipping point where a mass exodus from Twitter will occur?

We’ve been hoping to start a new project using Twitter data (through their Jabber API) but we’ve been denied access twice now (with a nice come back later mesg.). Hopefully Twitter will pull themselves together, we’d like to play in the Twitter ecosystem (besides just reading their feeds).

The machine this blog is on has been a bit flaky at times. I’m still trying to pin down exactly what’s going on, but occasionally it drops in and out. I was experimenting with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Wordpress 2.5 so I might have pushed too many experiments at once.

I figure I have some time to experiment with the machine since I doubt I have many readers here yet.

Thanks to Fred for pointing out it was down before.

I’ve done a lot of research on start-ups. Having read hundreds of books and too-many-to-count websites and blogs on the subject, I was nothing if not prepared when I decided to take the plunge and leave my corporate job to co-found Grazr. Or was I? The truth is, other’s experience and advice only gets you so far, there is no formula. My favorite blog post on the subject: Every Piece of Startup Advice is a Lie (including mine) by Tony Wright. It’s a list of startup platitudes and how, in almost every case, they come in mutually exclusive pairs with examples supporting each.

That’s why I tend to get heartburn when reading “here’s the formula for startup success” posts. There’s a conversation on Techmeme about PR in the “new world” of web 2.0 by Brian Solis on TechCrunch. We’re keenly interested in the roles of PR and marketing for our company, one of the reasons Adam weighed in on the topic. PR is one of those areas where we’ve tried to follow the “new math” of web 2.0 in building our company. Adam’s post flows from some of the frustrations. We’re constantly analyzing what we’re doing wrong with Grazr and we know we don’t have *it* yet (whatever it is).

Loic Le Meur weighed in on the conversation with a post about the “truth” of “PR bullshit”. I respect Loic, I think he’s done a great job with Seesmic and many of his ventures (like LeWeb), but I think he’s a bit off-base with his post. Don’t get me wrong, it sure feels good the way he describes the role (or lack thereof) of PR in web 2.0, but it’s the extrapolation of his experience into general truisms that I think is wrong.

The tone was set by his first “PR in the new world” truism.

Not a secret #1
who cares about stories, you can get traction and users if you have a good product

Ugh. As an engineer and a technologist, I cringe at the continuation of this myth. The quality and draw of your product is clearly an element of success, but to intimate that this is some fundamental truth is short sighted. How many times has an inferior product gained market dominance over superior products? How often have amazing technology products vanished because they failed to gain exposure to the right people. The history of the technology business is littered with examples. (Windows versus OS/2 anyone?) In most of these cases the equation is complicated, but to discount the role of PR and marketing is folly.

Not a secret #2
Do not pick a PR person, be the spokesperson of the company

He makes the point that the company founder should be the spokesman. For Loic this is definitely true, he’s charismatic and an excellent marketer. I’ve been following Seesmic’s progress, and my earliest exposures were highly polished video messages starring Loic. If you are a CEO or founder that is as charismatic as Loic and/or an innate marketer, then by all means you should be the spokesman. What if you’re in the situation where the CEO or founder brings different personal strengths and assets to the venture? Maybe they’re strong in areas like grand vision, technological expertise, or industry experience. You could make the mistake of saying the founder/CEO should cultivate this skill, but it’s always at the expense of energy that could be applied to the areas in which they’re already strong. One of the best things a CEO or founder can do is recognize their own personal limitations and find or hire others who are strong where they are weak. Is Loic saying that if you’re not good in front of a camera, or good at working the room, you have no business starting a company?

There are other entries on his list on building community and cultivating friendships with bloggers. All of it clearly worked for Loic, but I think seeing your own success through the lens of it being the “right” formula is dangerous for others trying to start companies. The truth for PR in startups is the same as all the other startup advice, there is no formula.

I thought I’d post why I’ve a sudden interest in Twitter and its problems. The truth is, we (Grazr) have some really good technology (IMHO) that could easily be repurposed to do Twitter-like things. As I mentioned before, we really over-thought the scaling issues so that happens to be one of our strengths (handling massive distributed data).

Adam and I discussed possibly building a twitter clone using the foundational pieces of our technology and open-sourcing the results. It wouldn’t take us long and we figured we could do something good for the community and bring Grazr back into the technology conversation (since we get very little attention). The other reason is that we have a lot of open source roots, the team is made up of the guys who helped scale slashdot and release slashcode, the open source version as well as having some ties to MySQL.

The problem is that we were guilty of looking at Twitter through the technology lens. Twitter is not about its technology, it’s about their oddly individualized experience and the people already in the system. There are already open source twitter clones, and closed source twitter-like services, yet none gain traction.

Duncan Riley has a post about killing twitter that I think hits on some of the main problems.

Dave Winer and a few others have previously discussed a distributed, open source Twitter that doesn’t rely on a centralized database. It’s a nice theory, but it ignores two realities: business model and people. Centralization is a business model that works as one company builds something they own, sure open source has its place but no serious startup (note startup, not big players) is going to build a system that doesn’t in some way provide them direct benefits going forward. The second problem is people: Twitter has them, every one who has tried to compete with Twitter so far (Jaiku, Pownce) doesn’t, and people only end up using services where their friends are. The bonus mix is competency: the dev team has to be competent at scaling, developing and running a Twitter like service.

(emphasis mine)

I think the open source arguments are assuming you’re building a company that does exactly what Twitter does, and somehow expects to extract value from that service. I don’t think that’s an argument against open source, there are lots of ways to extract value from a product whose codebase is open sourced. In fact, you could argue even Twitter themselves have yet to find ways to derive value from their own service with a closed model.

I highly agree, though, with the second point and that’s the primary reason why we decided it wasn’t worth it for us to put together a clone. Replicating the technology, that’s easy. Replicating the je ne sais quoi of Twitter and getting people to leave the established twitter audience, that’s hard.

We decided that we would rather target some of our technologies to play in the twitter eco-system that’s emerging rather than replace the twitter service. We actually think Dave Winer’s suggestion that Twitter is a reef, is more apt now than ever before.

The noise regarding “killing twitter” is getting louder but I don’t think Twitter is in too much danger yet. Having said that, there is a downtime-breaking-point at which Twitter could self-destruct. This would be a point where the Twitter experience of a majority of the users is irreparably compromised but I don’t think we’re there yet. Clearly the irritation of the “super users” is a bright red warning flag though.

We’ve tried focusing on our feed streams lately at Grazr (it’s the main focus of our homepage) and at the same time we’ve been playing with some alternate publishing / integration methods. This list of links should dynamically update as the sources in our a-list stream mention twitter along with scaling. Here’s what the A-list is saying:

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Dave Winer reacted today to the Twitter communication from Alex Payne. His response is interesting from a number of angles. First, he makes the excellent point that there is no one “Twitter experience”, everyone interacts with Twitter a little differently. He compares the situation to the old story about blind men describing an elephant using only their sense of touch. I couldn’t agree more with him. Dave’s experience is clearly very different from my own. And for “uber-twits” like Robert Scoble, I can’t even imagine what following tens of thousands of people is like.

After these points though, I disagree with where he takes his discussion. First he dismisses Alex’s description of their scaling issues, saying Alex doesn’t understand the problem because it somehow doesn’t mesh with Dave’s particular Twitter needs. I didn’t quite see the same mismatch from Alex’s post but then in quick succession he describes his own needs as three elephant groping blind men, two of which are contradictory regarding message delivery latency, and one requirement to be “on air” all the time.

This then leads to a declaration that Twitter must be decentralized due to the “always-on-air” requirement and that this is a necessary step towards using Twitter for business purposes. This seems like a bit of a stretch, unless I’m misreading it, it sounds like the common refrain of building a “better” twitter outside of or on top of the existing Twitter system. This is once again thinking that Twitter is relatively simple technology and therefore can easily be made better. It’s not the technology though that makes it good in the first place.

I think Dave’s own argument should point to why this will be a very hard thing to do. What is this decentralized Twitter? Who’s needs will it be built for? To stretch the analogy, it’s like now asking one of the blind men to build a better elephant. When they’re done, is it still an elephant? If the compelling aspect of Twitter is the uniquely individual experience drawn from it by users, how can you improve it for yourself without altering it for everyone else? You could argue that many blind men could build different facets of Twitter to suit their own needs, but then the other compelling reason to be on Twitter, that there are people on Twitter, is fractured when these populations of blind arch-types disperse. It seems like Dave’s own requirements are contradictory in some ways.

I’m going to try and post to this blog without obsessing about “crafting” posts. Maybe it will all be crap, but if I let my normal perfectionism take over I never post. Thats what happened with blog.grazr.com, lots of draft posts that never actually got published. It ended up being all about Grazr outage messages which was kind of depressing. So here’s attempt #3 at keeping an up-to-date blog.

Suddenly everyone is a scaling expert. I’ve worked in some pretty hard-core engineering environments dealing with these kinds of issues and the truth is scaling is hard. I find it amusing how everyone seems to have the solution for Twitter’s problems. Blog posts, comments like “just use PHP + ZEND dood”, or anything less than a true bottleneck analysis of the system is not going to provide a solution. There’s a reason why people pay big money for database performance consultants, scaling experts and their ilk.

Why is everyone talking about scaling? Because it’s a topic that gives us nerds “stiffys”. This post by Ted Dziuba cracks me up. Quick warning: he’s the guy who used to write “uncov” so yeah, it’s “colorful”. It’s funny but also somewhat painful. His post hits close to home with our experience with Grazr. We put a lot of effort into a good scaling architecture but we’ve not gotten as many users (yet) as we’d like. I even gave a talk at the MySQL conference where this was one of the main points (overemphasis on scaling).

We’ve been working on a new Twitter-based project at Grazr, and after doing some simple calculations I was surprised at the low volume of data/updates they’re really dealing with (yes I understand their topological issues). It’s surprising that after a year they haven’t solved their problems, there’s nothing inherently unique to what Twitter does. Even if their initial system was brain-dead, after a year (and no shortage of cash) I would have thought they would have found a path, no matter how painful, out of their current situation. I think their real problem is that, if the blog reports are to be believed, they’ve not hired people to focus on this issue. I have to repeat scaling is hard so if you want to solve the problem you need people to focus on it. A technology switch is not going to get you there.

I feel for the twitter guys, I do. They’re getting publicly whipped, but it’s in the A-list uber-nerd space. The loudest complaints also seem to come from people that aren’t really looking to change services. There are calls for twitter replacements, but a quick search will find several examples already. I attended a session at Boston BarCamp3 that was on this same topic as well. We even flirted with the idea here at Grazr, to build a twitter like thing. Why build a twitter replacement when there are lots of these things out there already (e.g. Pownce, Jaiku)? Why don’t people switch? Do you think you can out-Twitter Twitter?

The truth is that Twitter is not compelling because of its technology. People, especially technology people, often don’t understand user inertia, user investment in a service, and user experience as something separate from the technology. Would it be better if Twitter wasn’t down so often? Sure. Do I think it’s going to kill them? I think it would take a level of service outage much higher than what people are complaining about now.

Update: The twitter guys have responded. The gist, they’re hiring more people to work on the problem. It’s the classic “replace the engine while the car is running” problem but one I’m sure they’ll fix.