mikepk

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I wasn’t expecting this kind of a response from Robert Scoble to my comments on Mathew Ingram’s Blog regarding Twitter and their architectural issues. I really honestly appreciate the feedback on Grazr, even if it’s painful for me to hear as one if it’s creators.

First, I want to say, Grazr is still here. We have lots of users, just not as many as we’d like and not on the growth curve we’d been hoping for. We’ve been trying to evolve and iterate our service to find the elements of it that are compelling, what it “wants” to be. One of the truths of startups is that you rarely “hit it big” with your initial idea. Twitter had no idea what they were onto when they first launched the service. Flickr started as an online game for girls and it took them time to find their niche. The key is accepting feedback and looking for the aspects of your technology that people find interesting and moving emphasis. We are still very much in this process.

Robert, thanks for the feedback. What you’ve pointed out is pretty much an exact list of the issues we’ve identified as we’d planned for our next version of Grazr, one we intend to launch in a few months. The strength of our core team is the technology skill-base, which in a lot of ways gives us the opposite problem as Twitter. Our architecture, services and scaling are extremely solid, but at the same time we’ve brought in some new people to help us redesign, re-articulate and relaunch the service in ways we’re confident are going to be much more consumer-facing and understandable.

I’ll be very interested in your thoughts on the new version. I’ll let you know when we’re ready, I would love to get more (albeit brutal) honest feedback

(I cross posted this to our company blog Feedonomics as well)

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.

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.