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Scoble and Twitter, Behind the Scenes

Posted on May 31, 2008 by jessestay

Today I had a very unique opportunity to in many ways get in the middle of the Twitter Fiasco, the VentureBeat article suggesting that Robert Scoble was the reason for Twitter’s failures, and Robert’s response to it. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget, and before I start I want to thank Robert for bringing me along to be able to participate and hear all of this, first hand (and still getting me back to the airport in time). Robert Scoble’s such an amazing guy and no one could ever tell me otherwise – I wish all could meet him in person, hang out with him, etc. like I was able to do today.

Originally Robert and I were just going to go up to the Disqus new offices and see the founders, Daniel Ha and Jason Yan (they said they are readers of this blog!). However, today around lunch he called and said we were going to make a pit stop at the Twitter offices in South Park. I was told they had made an offer to him (and he was happy to accept) to come by and chat about the recent blog posts and frustration between the two.

When we got to Twitter I was actually quite impressed by the professionalism of Ev and Biz at Twitter, along with Robert as they discussed the matter. There was some nervousness on both parts I could tell, but after the cards were laid out on the table and both sides understood, I think both felt a little better about the situation. In the end, here’s what I got out of the conversation (which you can view via Robert’s Qik stream here):

There is still a long way to go before Twitter will have a fully functional product – they are in the process of re-architecting it all so they can scale further as it grows further.

It does seem they’re still trying to work with it to make the existing system work with what they have.

The problems they are having are NOT because of big “whale” (and I doubt the picture on Twitter’s error page was meant to reflect this) users such as Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington.

The problems they are having are very much due to problems with their current architecture, and in particular the way their API is currently set up to handle. Their system was built as a prototype and ended up becoming the product.

There is no good immediate solution to this. As they remove API features, applications like Twhirl and TweetScan, and other 3rd party applications with thousands of users will fail, and thus the users will complain and leave. They simply can’t punish the developers as a whole because it would end up offending their users as well.

There are still some pretty smart people at Twitter and I really think they know what they’re doing – they’re just stuck between a rock and a hard spot because they designed their architecture wrong.

The most interesting thing for me, and should be for developers as well, IMO, came at the end however, and I think it’s a smart move the faster they can implement it. Twitter is looking into the possibility of having a better way of tracking the Applications developers write on the Twitter API. By doing such, they can first of all put an end to spammy applications that are abusing the system and killing their traffic with too many unnecessary requests (similar to the way Facebook does with notification limits), but secondly they can begin to organize the Applications and provide a centralized directory for all the Twitter applications out there.

I recorded this video to get Robert’s thoughts on the interview afterwards – I think he shares the same feelings as I do:

Getting Robert Scoble’s Thoughts After the Twitter Interview from Jesse Stay on Vimeo.

You can also see some more of my thoughts afterwards, although I think I was still processing it after we were done so I didn’t say much. You can see that on Robert’s Qik stream here.

In all, I think while there’s still a long way for Twitter to get everything worked out, what they said to us was very promising. It’s promising, yet frustrating at the same time because I know it may still be some time. They are willing to accept help and ideas. If you are a developer and want to offer your time to help them out, join their mailing list, offer your assistance in any way. Most of all, as was pointed out, if you’re going to do any heavy hitting on their API, let’s talk to them the same way they’re talking to us now. Let’s build an open communication between the developers and the Twitter dev team themselves and I think perhaps we can all work together to make Twitter an even better place than it was before.

I’m going to talk a little more about my trip to the Bay area in another post coming up. I feel like I visited half the Web 2.0 internet, in person, in a matter of 3 days, and I’m still processing it all. The Bay is an amazing place that you just have to see for yourself to believe. Now Robert – my offer still stands if you ever want to come out to Salt Lake and have me show you around next time!

Where is Jaiku???

Posted on May 29, 2008 by jessestay

I don’t know if it’s the horrible logistics at yesterday’s keynote and that I had to sit on the floor to watch it, or the T-Shirts that in binary say, “GoogleKO” (Mike, I’ll give you mine if you have lunch with me tomorrow), or maybe the fact that I now can’t get internet connectivity as I write this due to the poor planning for WiFi in this room. Or maybe it’s that I’m presenting on Facebook and have had Facebook on the mind the time I’ve been here, but I’ve really been on an anti-Google run lately and I’m not sure why.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed here at Google I/O is there is absolutely no presence of Jaiku at the event. I haven’t seen any booths, presenters are not running it up on the screens like we saw with Twitter at Web 2.0, and it almost seems as though Google doesn’t care that there is an opportunity with the problems Twitter is having right now. In fact, I think I’ve even seen Twitter on a few of the presenters boxes rather than Jaiku.

Does Google just not care about Jaiku? They have an amazing opportunity here. Twitter is down about one half of the time. They are hosting a blog on their competitor, Tumblr’s, site because they can’t trust their own servers by all means! I don’t agree that FriendFeed is a competitor to Twitter – Jaiku is, however, and now is the time for them to step up! Google has a conference with attendance that perhaps exceeds that of Web 2.0, and the whole world watching them as they make some serious announcements, so I can’t figure out why they aren’t taking this opportunity to gain an edge on their competitors.

Jaiku is perhaps the only other service out there with an SMS status update system similar to Twitter’s. People really want to find another solution that solves what Twitter gives them. Jaiku does this, and Google is failing seriously at promoting it and bringing attention to it at this conference.

Twitter!

Posted on May 25, 2008 by jessestay

The first 1 word post on Techmeme. Just saying…

New Series: Social Coding

Posted on May 25, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been contemplating for awhile now a good way to share what I know about Social Software Development and helping business owners, marketers, and developers learn how to set up their own social apps. Especially for developers, I know there are many out there looking for howtos and ways to learn more about starting their own App, promoting it, and getting it off the ground. As the author of FBML Essentials, I feel I am well suited for the task so in the next few days I’m going to start doing howtos and overviews on how you can get your own Apps together. If you’re “the business type”, I may get a little technical on you, but I do recommend you keep watching and forward these onto your IT personell – your CIO, CTO, and the like should read these so they can learn what’s possible to integrate into your existing environments. I’ll also try to throw in a little goodie here and there for “the business type”.

So, I’ve created a new category to the right, “Social Coding” – if you want to track just that, click on the category name and add it to your RSS. I’ve also started a new FriendFeed Room where those involved or that want to get involved in Social Coding can discuss, learn, and talk with each other. You can subscribe to that here.

Let’s start by going over the types of sites I could cover. Here are just a few – let me know if you have a particular interest in learning about how to code for any one in particular:

Facebook

OpenSocial

Google Friend Connect

Twitter

FriendFeed

Pligg

Digg

MySpace

WordPress

MoveableType

Google App Engine

Bungee Connect

Stay tuned! I’ll keep posting news and other rants as we go forward – I’ll just be adding in some good howtos at the same time. Oh, and if you’re a developer and would like to do a howto in your preferred language for us, contact me – I’d love to let you do a guest post.

Kirk Yuhnke, Reporter for Fox News 13 Joins the Conversation – My Tips for Him as a Reporter

Posted on May 19, 2008 by jessestay

I was made aware via Twitter of all places today that Kirk Yuhnke, a reporter for Utah’s Fox 13 News morning show, has joined Twitter. They did a feature about Twitter, demoing it for Dan and Kerri (couldn’t find a link to the Morning Show on MyFoxUtah!) and showing live on the air how it works. You can see the post he made on the air here.

Looking at his Tweets, it looks as though Kirk has been using Twitter for at least a few days – I am curious what introduced him to Twitter. Anyway, it’s very refreshing to see more Old Media reporters and news people embracing Twitter as a tool to both receive and report the news. I think Kirk will realize very fast that Twitter’s more than just an addicting little thing to report statuses on – Twitter’s “the world’s largest conversation” (I tweeted that – wish Twitter archived Tweets for longer), and because of that, you’re able to get into everyone’s lives, receive news as it happens, and report it as it happens.

Kirk, in case you happen to read, here are some tips I’d love to give you as a reporter that I think you’ll really enjoy:

Follow @newmediajim. Jim Long, a camera man for NBC News’s Presidential detail is one of the early users of Twitter. He has reported while on trips to Iraq, world summits, and basically anywhere the President goes. You get the news, as it happens – he’s the essence of one reason Twitter is so popular.

Today, type “track san diego explosion” into Twitter. Soon, if you have notifications turned on in your Twitter settings, you’ll be receiving new notifications either via your cell phone or IM (depending on your user preferences) on everyone living in San Diego talking about the explosion at the downtown Hilton in San Diego.

Use Tweetscan. Go to http://tweetscan.com and search for recent news you are tracking – do a search for “wii fit” and find a record of everyone trying out the Wii Fit. Do a search for “KirkYuhnke” and find out about all the people like me that are talking about you. As a reporter, this will be invaluable to use!

Add 40404 to your Cell Phone. Be sure to add 40404 and set the name to “Twitter” on your cell phone. Then send a message to that address book entry. Now, imagine you’re the reporter on the scene at midnight at a local explosion and Fox 13 News has decided to go off the air and report it in the morning (true story!). You can live-report the event, all via Twitter, and those viewers all yelling at their screen asking what the explosion was can get up-to-the-minute updates on the Explosion happening. Not just that, but those outside of Utah following you can find out what’s happening! (I had about 5 people from outside of Utah trying to come to me after the south provo plant explosion a few months ago wanting the latest news about it, and I had nothing to give them!)

Check out Twhirl. As a big news reporter, everyone will want to follow you on Twitter, and you’ll be quite a popular guy, both in and out of Utah! Here’s what I do: I follow everyone that follows me (unless they are outright spammers) – this allows them to direct message me if they need to (Twitter only allows those you are following to DM you), and shows that I have an interest in them as well. It’s courtesy, in my opinion. Now, install Twhirl on your computer, and use that to skim through the messages of all those you follow – you don’t have to read every single one, but at least you’ll have a good overview of what’s happening in the world.
Now, for those nearest and dearest to you that you want to follow and pay attention to, turn on notifications for those people. Leave notifications for all the others off. Now, all those that you want to pay attention to will go to either your cell phone or IM client (depending on your Twitter preferences), and you won’t miss any of the important stuff. I should also mention that with notifications turned on, both @replies and direct messages will go to either your cell phone or IM client as well. This ensures you get all the important stuff.

Use SocialToo.com. Okay, this is a little shameless plug on my part, but it’s one of the only services of its kind out there. When you sign up at http://socialtoo.com/registration and provide your Twitter credentials, it will automatically start following those people that follow you, for you. Not just that, but you can blacklist users you don’t want it to follow, and even leave a message for new followers (that features actually slightly broken right now, but you get the point). This will allow you to use the technique I mention above.

Check out my post on ways to change the world using Twitter. I track the term “earthquake” as one of the terms I track, and recently there was a 4.0+ earthquake in London. I started receiving an influx of Twitters from people experiencing that Earthquake before it was even reported on USGS! Robert Scoble also does this, and recently he reported about learning of the recent China Earthquake before even USGS reported. Twitter has power in this way.

So Kirk, I think I speak for all of Twitter when I say, “welcome to the conversation!” Keep talking – we’d love to see what we can do to help you out. Hey, maybe we’ll even invite you to a “Tweetup” some time.

For those that would like to follow Kirk, he goes by @kirkyuhnke on Twitter.

The Mormon Church/Wikileaks Fiasco (or not-so-fiasco), A Mormon’s Perspective

Posted on May 14, 2008 by jessestay

Note that I’m not going to provide any links to the mentioned content here – you can go research yourself. Unlike Wikileaks, I respect others’ copyright.

One thing you may notice on this blog is that while I rarely pipe in with religious thoughts and my own personal religious beliefs (although I used to quite often), I will not hesitate to step in when a Social Media-related religious event occurs. An interesting Groundswell is happening today between the Headquarters of my Faith, and the controversial anonymous sharing site, Wikileaks. However, I don’t think it’s occurring in the way people think it is.

This morning on Slashdot you may have seen an article about the Mormon Church (or “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints“, which is the Official name of the Church) sending a Cease and Desist to Wikileaks for posting links to a Copyrighted, yet old version (1999) of the Church’s “General Handbook of Instructions” for others to freely download.

I don’t understand why this is news. Having been in LDS Bishoprics before as a Clerk and Executive Secretary, I am very familiar with this manual. It is simply a guide for leaders of the Church to know how to council and guide members of the Church, and according to my understanding, NOT (fully) DOCTRINE. It is simply a Policy manual, and while Bishops and other Leaders of the church may follow its council, in the end they are left up to their own judgement (encouraged by the Church “to follow the promptings of the Spirit”) to decide how to handle matters in the Church. The Church considers the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Perl of Great Price to be the Official Doctrine of the Church.

The Mormon Church is simply requesting Wikileaks remove the content because it is their own IP, not Wikileaks, and they are removing it as they would any other Church-owned and copyrighted document. Wikileaks and other sites are also portraying the contents of the manual as though it is doctrine for the general membership of the Mormon church, when in reality it was only intended as a guide for Leaders in the first place. The Mormon church has to protect the dissemination of false information as well.

In Charlene Li’s and Josh Bernoff’s book, Groundswell, she starts out with an example that happened last year on Digg.com where a user shared a blog post about how the HD-DVD Encryption standard had been broken. AACS LA quickly sent a cease and desist to Digg.com and the Digg.com founders promptly removed the link. Before Digg knew it, their own users began to backlash against them, occupying the entire front page of Digg with copies of the HD DVD encryption algorithm. Digg had a Groundswell of its own between its own users and it knew it had to do something. What did they do? They listened to their users and put the link back up, stating they would go down fighting rather than ignore their users.

I think with the post on SlashDot this morning some people may be thinking (and some hoping) a similar Groundswell is going to occur with the Mormon Church. Those that think so will be pleasantly surprised – there’s a difference between a Groundswell of your own members and those outside of your membership talking about you. How do you handle a Groundswell of people outside of your customer-base/user-base/member-base? You get in the conversation!

I want to share with you a video from Elder Russell M. Ballard, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Quorum of 12 Apostles – religious or not, I’d like to encourage you to read this not just from a religious perspective, but also a business perspective and how you can disseminate correct information about your business:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is getting in the Groundswell through its own members. They encourage their members to blog, Twitter, get on Facebook, and clarify misconceptions. The Mormon Church will overcome this Groundswell (if you can even call it one) via its own membership, correcting misinformation Socially rather than through news releases and other means and letting the general media and blogosphere say what it believes. They have a Youtube channel here. They are on Twitter. They have a Facebook Page.

I encourage other churches and even businesses to take this response – there is a lot that can be applied from a religious, or even non-religious perspective from this. When you get your own followers of any business, brand, or religion to spread correct information about your brand it can overcome any misinformation spread about it.

Wikileaks is wrong in this case – they are sharing copyrighted information, not owned by themselves, and without the permission of the owner. The LDS Church isn’t going after them because the shared links are “secret”, but rather it is copyrighted material, and Wikileaks does not have permission to share it! As a book author and software developer I don’t want people using my content without my permission (which I’m generally pretty relaxed on in my personally owned content). Why would I want Wikileaks sharing the content I personally own on their site let alone others?

Twitter Now Removing Blacklisted Accounts

Posted on May 6, 2008 by jessestay

(I’m beginning to move much of my activity over to FriendFeed lately. Scoble calls it the “World Wide Talk Show” – please subscribe to my feed to comment and participate!)

I was going to write a few more of my annoyances with Twitter today, but a few pleasant announcements have come out of Twitter lately that I thought I’d share.

First, just announced today, Twitter will be shutting down accounts entirely that they have marked as “spam” on their blacklist. What??? Twitter has a blacklist? Yes, you heard it right.

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted. It was the same with the API – it was actually a huge headache for me as a Twitter API developer because despite me following the user, Twitter would respond with nothing as though the follow went through, but the next day the user would show up again as not being followed. I checked with Twitter and they confirmed the accounts I was having trouble with were indeed accounts that were on their “blacklist”.

Today, Alex Payne confirmed on the Twitter Dev mailing list that from now on users marked as Spam on Twitter will have their accounts suspended entirely for violating the Terms of Service. He also confirmed that they would avoid the headaches Facebook has had (aka Scoble’s account being suspended) and contact the owners beforehand to let them state their case.

I strongly welcome this new practice – Twitter has all the stats on their end to flag accounts as possible spammers, and by removing their accounts promptly this will make Twitter a much nicer place to use. The only other thing I would suggest they add now that this is in place is a way for developers to notify them of possible Spam accounts. You can do this as a user by “blocking” the account in question – I have no way to do this as a developer that I’m aware of.

The second, very welcomed feature is the addition of a “since” variable when requesting the friends or followers of an individual. In the past on SocialToo.com I had to do a request on all of an individual’s friends and all of an individual’s followers, and do a compare to see which of those following you, you weren’t following. For several A-list bloggers with near tens of thousands of followers, this was taking a few hours to complete the entire script, not to mention increasing the number of HTTP requests back to Twitter’s servers, I’m sure further burdening their already overburdened bandwidth.

Now, with the “since” variable, I can keep a tally of when I last checked your following/follower ratio and only do a request on those friends that have followed you since the last check. I can now go from checking those you follow on a daily basis, to checking almost every minute!

Last, Twitter has added the ability to determine, with one API call if a friendship exists between two individuals. Now rather than having to get a list of those you’re following, and then those that have followed you, I can just get a list of those following you and check to see that a friendship exists.

It is very refreshing to see such an active effort on Twitter’s part to help out the development community. I hope they continue to maintain the relationship they have with us, and continue to listen – many of us really want to see them succeed.

Why I Hate the Twitter Syntax

Posted on May 3, 2008 by jessestay

I have disliked the Twitter syntax since I’ve been on it (you can find me via @JesseStay on Twitter – go ahead and follow me!). As a long-time IRC user, everything seems backwards! I have often referred to Twitter as “IRC 2.0”. I’m not sure I can fully embrace that concept though.

For those unfamiliar with IRC, it predates even instant messaging. It brought out the original concept of a “chatroom”, and exists even today on various servers throughout the world. Ustream.tv currently uses it for its users’ channel chatrooms. It is the home for almost any “live” activity of any open source project (log into irc.freenode.net to see – I’m often in #utah there, as well as recently #codeaway). Traditions have been established, and virtual friendships have been bonded. In many ways it could have been the original concept of a “social network”, the first concept of linking friends together in a single place on the internet.

I was at a Perl conference just last year, and was happy to see the #YAPC chatroom in irc.perl.org open during the banquet. We had a ton of fun with that! Now, just this year, when I go to conferences, I see speakers leaving up Twitter, and answering questions via Twitter. The two seem to be serving similar purposes, in different ways.

That’s why I was astonished when I got on Twitter for the first time, and started seeing public messages directed to individuals with “@” signs in front of them! Is there a source for that that I’m not aware of? I know of no known documentation that Twitter themselves created to establish that tradition. In IRC you simply type “username:”, and then your message, and it gets highlighted in that user’s chat window in most IRC clients. Better yet, I can start typing the username and it tab-completes. You can’t do that in Twitter. That tradition and method has been around for years, yet Twitter seems to break the mold for some reason.

IRC also supports commands – I can type “/nick newnickname”, and it switches my username, automatically! It’s a basic standard that all clients support, open, and available for all to use. Twitter I have to go entirely to their website to do anything, and it’s extremely limited in what you can do. To direct message someone on Twitter, I have to type, “dm username message”. In IRC it’s just a simple command, like all other commands, and I can always type, “/help” if I don’t know what the commands available are. I simply type, “/msg username message”, and it messages the user, and again, it tab-completes the username!

Why couldn’t Twitter just use the IRC standard in their platform, and then expand upon it to improve the IRC standard and bring it to a mobile world? By all means many of their scalability issues may have been taken care of had they done so. Not just that, but they would now be able to support groups, and less development would be needed to manage their platform. Twitter says they have an open API – I question that openness. It’s not based on much of an open standard, and IMO, it’s causing them problems now because of it.

Looking to start a project? Always look at the open solutions that are out there first, then build upon them – you’ll have much fewer headaches if you do.

(Photo courtesy GapingVoid.com)

Toronto Star and the Power of Community

Posted on April 19, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve written before on the power of community and how Social Networks are bringing back the days of the small community within a large world. That’s why I was happy to hear in a recent interview I had with Erin MacLeod of the Toronto Star that BJ Fogg, Professor at Stanford, and teacher of the “Psychology of Facebook” class seemed to be on the same track (Fogg is also author of an excellent book on technology and marketing called “Persuasive Technology“). From the Toronto Star article,

“If you look at the history of civilization, you’re part of a community and as you grow up you stay connected with a community and those past lives and past friends,” Fogg says. “So maybe in some ways Facebook is bringing back what humans have lived with for thousands of years, a persistence of identity and relationships for decades.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Fogg. In the article I mention that it goes even further beyond that though. Technology always adds another layer to something that previously existed in a lesser form. With Social Networks, technology is simply bringing together a massive world of people into a small community-type atmosphere, but at the same time allowing a layer of privacy, giving users control over what that small community sees, and does not see.

It’s true that you will need to be more careful in the future with what you reveal on Social Networks, but the power of these Social Networks is that there are controls in place already to prevent information from getting out. Facebook has friends lists, privacy features, and flags you can enable and disable to control what elements are revealed to what people. You’ll find similar elements in other networks. I imagine even in Twitter (which I argue isn’t necessarily a “Social Network”, but rather a communications platform for Social Networks of people) will develop methods to segregate your friends and communicate only to whom you want.

At the same time, I feel we are becoming more forgiving of one another. We recognize through these mediums that we are all human, with flaws and imperfections, and that’s okay. Social Networks have power to make the world a better place.

Check out Fogg’s Psychology of Facebook class on Facebook here – he Ustreams it live every week!