Home - Stay N Alive

Tonight for about a full hour many Rackspace sites, including their own Slicehost service, inquisitr.com, Laughing Squid-hosted sites, Posterous, Tr.im, and even my own SocialToo.com. Ben Parr of Mashable even noticed, asking if a bunch of websites has all just crashed. I was reminded to check the status of my own site by a few posts by Duncan Riley on FriendFeed.com/Twitter, followed by a blog post of his own. That prompted me to realize my entire site had been down for over an hour, which prompted me to check their Twitter account, which prompted me to check their status blog that gave a few more details.

This got me thinking – why are services so reliant on Twitter to get the word out to their customers? Have we gotten that lazy? In the past a service with “Fanatical Support” would have sent out a brief e-mail to their customers notifying them of the update. Do they just expect all their customers to be checking every single one of their Twitter updates? I have to admit as a customer I’m a bit disappointed.

I don’t mean to pick on just Rackspace though. Rackspace aren’t the only ones doing this. It has come to be common practice amongst companies to just post status updates on their own Twitter account and (occasionally) blog without using the oldest means of notification, a push means for that matter out to their users – e-mail. I admit even my own service SocialToo has been guilty of this occasionally and I have vowed for more mission-critical issues facing my customers that we will try to be more diligent in letting them know, via e-mail of the issues facing them, as soon as possible. That said, I’m one of two employees/contractors working for the company right now, as compared to Rackspace’s and other companies’ hundreds.

I think it’s time companies that provide mission-critical services start laying off the Twitter Kool-Aid, and focusing on more serious means such as e-mail so their customers can become aware, as the issues are happening to the accounts they pay for. It’s time we get back to using e-mail as a communications medium. Now that I’m aware of the issue, I’m checking their blog frequently for updates, but a simple e-mail would have made huge strides in making the $600 I pay monthly to the service more worth it.

As of the end of this writing it appears the problems are mostly resolved. I am anxiously awaiting an e-mail explaining the problem, but hope in the future they can get infrastructure in place to quickly notify us via e-mail as fast as they were able to do on Twitter. I hope other services can also learn from this and prepare for similar circumstances. While I’ll continue to enjoy the service I’ve had from Slicehost, I would have liked to see more than just a Twitter update surrounding this.

UPDATE: Ironically, Ed Millard on FriendFeed pointed out that the support address for Rackspace is twitter@rackspace.com. sigh

Google’s Walled Garden

Posted on October 29, 2009 by jessestay

Among the things Robert Scoble is good at he is definitely good at getting us bloggers talking. Today he shared on Posterous (which I am subscribed and read in Google Reader) his reasons for not using Google Reader any more. Robert was the one that got me into Google Reader in the first place, so coming from him, this is a bold statement. He has some points though – I’d like to put this in a different view. Google Reader is Google’s Walled Garden. There is no public search. There is no public access to comments. There is no public access to seeing what Robert is liking or commenting on or how he is interacting with the site. The only thing public are the shares. I have to be following you for you to be able to comment on, view comments, or like my shares. There is no way to make those comments or likes public. In a social web, that’s unacceptable.

Let’s first contrast that with Facebook. Facebook, the original “walled garden” at least allows those you are friends with to comment and see your comments and likes. The relationship is mutual. Not only that, but you have granularity in who sees what you post, and therefore who can comment on it. Of course Facebook could still do better in this as well.

Now look at Twitter, supposedly the most open environment of all Social environments (if you don’t count MySpace). With Twitter I can respond to anyone. Anyone can see my response. I can retweet, and anyone can see my retweet. I can even create an entire list of people and anyone can see that list of people. Conversely, Twitter doesn’t provide the openness of granularity to allow people to be private as they choose (yes, I define that as openness as well), so even it fails to an extent.

What Scoble is having problems with I think is the fact that his content, his comments,and his likes are encapsulated in this walled garden in Google Reader. Even his shares are pretty hard to find – he has to share the URL for you to have access to them. I think all this lends to a poor User Interface, and a very “unsocial” experience. It’s very hard to share things beyond just the articles in Google Reader.

My suggestion would be, assuming Google Reader wants to be a more social experience: open up more. Make it easier to find peoples’ shares. Make it easier for people to comment on my feeds. Make it easier for people to like my feeds. Give us an API to those comments and likes. Get rid of duplicate content (okay, that’s just an unrelated pet-peeve). At the same time maintain the openness of granularity to enable privacy should people choose. The default should be openness though. Google is not and never was a Walled Garden. Google Reader shouldn’t be either.

At the same time you can follow me on Google Reader here.

It’s About Technology That Creates Community

Posted on October 28, 2009 by jessestay

I’ve been rambling on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook tonight about the differences in how Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed’s founders participate in each community. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page. Notice how he basically talks at the community? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a comment by him with his followers (perhaps part of the reason why it’s so difficult to manage Fan Pages right now). Now look at Ev Williams and Biz Stone’s Twitter profiles. You’ll notice a little more participation, but mostly with their inner circles and occasional outreaches to the community. Now go read Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor’s FriendFeed profiles. Notice that they’re very actively involved in the conversation, responding in their own threads to people they barely know, participating in others’ conversations, etc. I think if you look at the profiles of other employees in each of the three organizations you’ll see a similar trend. Why is it that the community where the founders and employees participate the most is the smallest community with the lowest growth rate?

I’ve been contemplating this tonight. FriendFeed, as a whole has one of the tightest communities of all. For those that participate actively in the site, we quickly come to know each other – it’s the place where everybody knows your name. That’s why Scoble, and Louis Gray, and myself are so passionate about it. It is a great place to go meet new people, find more information, and grow with a community that cares and knows you. I asked the question why Facebook and even Twitter don’t see this as an opportunity to win a new audience, much of which feels a bit betrayed by the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, and many who have never done much venturing outside the network to new places. It seems like an opportunity to me – after all, when Facebook bought FriendFeed, they bought the technology, not the community. The community is something that has to be earned, not bought.

Yet, at the same time I wonder if it really matters. With Facebook and Twitter’s immense growth, do they really need to be paying attention to the small FriendFeed community? FriendFeed has great technology, and great talent that built that technology, now working for Facebook (one who just left). Can the community be won in other ways? I think it can, and it goes back to the first paragraph above – look at the numbers compared to participation. I argue a community’s growth is not relative to the participation of its founders, but rather the technology’s capability to build community even further. It’s the technology that trumps community any day because it creates and enables that community. Technology that empowers individuals to create their own communities wins any day, and trumps founder participation hands down.

Gasp! You say – you mean I don’t have to participate to build a community? No, that’s not what I’m saying. If you’re a user of the tools, you definitely must be participating, nurturing, and sharing for your community to grow. What I’m saying though is that no matter who the founders are and whether they participate in your personal community or not, you’re going to take your community to the places that enable you to nurter, build, and grow a community the best. That’s why Facebook grew the fastest. That’s why people use Twitter. It’s also why FriendFeed was the smallest, yet had a great acquisition of some very talented individuals who know how to build this type of technology.

Let’s look at the technologies:

Facebook

Facebook not only enables you to share status updates with your friends, but enables you to share photos, videos, notes, links, and more, all in an integrated environment. You have privacy controls to which you can control how public the information you share with your friends is. This encourages a native environment where family and close friends can communicate and share with each other, focusing on each individual’s roots to build community out of. You have lists that you can organize these individuals and filter their updates in your news stream.

At the same time Facebook provides Fan Pages, indexable by Google, for which you can subscribe, or “fan”, similar to the way you would do on the other networks. This is your public, more anonymous persona, something I think each individual needs as well. This enables you to share with the rest of the world what you’re doing, and build community and share through that means.

Then you have the API. Not only as an entrepreneur, developer, or community builder do I have access to create applications that create and nurture community within the Facebook environment, but Facebook has also given me the technology and tools to do that on my own website, all with the community I’m working to build on Facebook itself. It enables me to do that with my own community, and enable them to bring their communities into my own.

The richness of that experience is what makes Facebook so big, and is the reason for its growth. That has nothing to do with its founders or their participation. I’m not sure they need to participate so long as they keep building technology that further enables individual communities on the network.

Twitter

Twitter baffles me at times, but I think I understand it. Twitter’s openness and focus on such a simple thing, status updates, is what has made it grow so big. Users can do whatever they want with the network. They can use it to update their friends with what they’re doing, respond, and grow a community through open communication.

Twitter also encourages the initiation of conversation. You post something on Twitter, link to somewhere else, and the communication continues elsewhere. Some times that filters back to Twitter. Some times the entire communication happens on Twitter.

Twitter’s API is as open as it can be. It’s fairly limited as compared to Facebook’s, but has enabled many people to bring their communities on Twitter back to their own brand and vice-versa to further grow community.

The problem with Twitter as compared to Facebook is that it is only status updates. You can respond, reply, and even retweet items you read, but it all centers around those status updates. There’s not much more depth than that, limiting the type and size of community one can build on the network. Yet at the same time the openness and lack of rules around users and its developer platform has enabled people to do things they would not normally be able to do with a community on Facebook. That’s why they’ve continued to grow and are the size (and hype) they are right now.

At the same time because they’re not quite the enablers of community in regards to their technology which Facebook is, I think their Founders and employees need to participate and get involved a little more. The technology still doesn’t quite sustain the building of community the way Facebook’s does.

FriendFeed

I could probably argue FriendFeed has better technology that encourages and enables community building better than Twitter’s. The problem with FriendFeed is that almost all the technology found in FriendFeed keeps getting gobbled up by Twitter and Facebook. There’s not much new to it, and now that they’ve been bought by Facebook, that doesn’t appear to need to fully compete – it would just be an additional complement to the community-building offerings Facebook offers.

Beforehand FriendFeed was doing a good job keeping up, and perhaps could have even caught up to at least Twitter. Its growth was even starting to show that before they were acquired. Yet their founders still participated, as did the other employees of the company. Why is this? It was possible because the community was smaller – the founders were simply growing with the community, and the community was and is still a tight-knit community of people that knew each other.

I think as FriendFeed continued to build technology that enabled others to build community and relationships, that participation would have slowly evolved to each of the founders’ own close communities. They would not have needed to participate for the community to grow.

Conclusion

So what do we make of all this? I think the moral here is that entrepreneurs need to focus more on building technologies that encourage and enable community. When you’re writing code or having others write it is it enabling people to build relationships? Is it enabling people to share with others? How much so?

The Facebook/Twitter or even Google or Microsoft or Apple battle isn’t over yet – in the end it will be the one that best enables their users through technology to build their own communities and communicate better with each other. The better competitors will master this. There will be other entrants. It’s not the participation of a community’s founders that determines its success. It’s the technology of the company which creates community that does. In that regard, technology trumps community, hands down.

What News Has Me Excited About Twitter Again?

Posted on October 27, 2009 by jessestay

No, it’s not lists. Facebook has already had those for over a year now (of which we featured in I’m on Facebook–Now What??? when it first came out). What has me excited is the hiring of a new employee today. Josh Elman, previously the Platform Program Manager for Facebook and former Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, today joined Twitter as the 3rd Product manager hired at the growing company. What has me excited? He knows platforms and he truly understands the vision of Facebook – this is a huge hit on Facebook and huge win for Twitter. This is a guy with serious experience, something that has had me concerned in the past for Twitter.

I mentioned before any idea to the contrary that Twitter is trying to be like Facebook is a lie. The fact is Twitter has to be like Facebook to compete and grow. The only other option Twitter has is to sell, and we know they’re not looking to do that. What better than hiring top talent directly from the competitor you’re trying to be like? Josh Elman was one of Facebook’s best – he was there when Facebook went profitable. He knows this stuff.

As a developer on the Facebook platform, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Josh, as have many other developers. He was one of our primary points of contact, and after writing FBML Essentials, Dave Morin, the man in charge of Facebook’s Connect platform, immediately introduced me to Josh for reference and we have kept in contact since. I was always amazed at his vision for things, and his friendly attitude towards the developers working on the platform. He did a lot for Facebook. I was really sad to see him go.

Now I get to turn to Twitter and see what he will do there. Josh Elman is one of the single biggest hires for Twitter in a long time, and I can’t wait to see what happens. With him at the helm of Product Manager, will we see Twitter grow profitable? Will we see a stronger developer platform product? Will we see more Facebook-like features? What weaknesses will Twitter seek out?

I’m finally excited about something again at Twitter. Josh is a great addition and I can’t wait to see what happens.