If You Canât Let Go, Twitter
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The group-messaging application, Twitter, still hasnât broken into the mainstream or become a to-die-for tool for the youngest early adopters.
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Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it's been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is. The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don't think last night's Republican debate took Twitter down. Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.  Twitter wouldn't exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Let's have some real honest direct communication?
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If you're a regular user of Twitter you're probably quite familiar with this image.  They've tried lots of variants, making it funny, or cute, with pictures of LOL Cats, doing cute things with screw drivers, but the pictures aren't funny for long, the more you see them, the more tiresome they get. Then I had an idea they could be used for a good cause.  Yeah that does it!
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Meet the twixters. They're not kids anymore, but they're not adults either. why a new breed of young people won't--or can't?--settle down
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Evan Williams, the Blogger guy and Twitter co-founder, gave a talk at LeWeb3 about keeping software small, and how sometimes you can create a product by removing features from an existing product. He showed how Twitter is less than Blogger, no permalinks, titles, comments, templates, etc. It's almost nothing compared to Blogger, but we're using it and liking it. It's not a new story. When I was coming of age in computer science, the newest computers were minicomputers. They were called that because they were smaller and did less than the mainframe computers that came before. They were followed by microcomputers which did even less and were a lot more popular than minicomputers (which of course were more popular than mainframes). Scaling things down can make them more useful. But it's a paradox because once a feature is in a product you can't take it out or the users will complain so loudly that you put it back in right away. I know, I tried, a number of times to back out of features that I thought of better ways to do. You can always add features to products, it will make the existing users happy. But it often comes at a cost of making the product more complicated for first-time users, and they don't have a voice, they can't complain, they just go somewhere else, usually quietly.  So Evan has a point. Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it.  But there are certainly features they could add to Twitter that would have no impact on the steepness of the learning curve (i.e. how easy it is for a new user to get started). For example users are good at skipping over prefs they don't understand. But you have to think carefully about what the default should be, so there's no penalty for not caring.  Also features that only appear in the API have no cost in complexity of the user interface. They might make it possible for a developer to build a new product on top of the existing one. Since the user of the base product can't see the feature, it can't make it harder to learn.  Some users say they don't want new features, but I bet most of them would be very happy to use a new feature that made Twitter more fun or useful. And there are  alot of users who don't say anything about it, and don't think much about it. Most people aren't interested in theories about why products catch on, they like it or they don't, and don't know why they do or don't.  It's always good to ask questions about why things work, but if I could offer the Twitter folk any advice, I'd say don't hesitate too much to put in new features that will make users happy. Ultimately users like new features in products they use a lot. There's a reason why products tend to bloat over time, it's because users demand it. The trick is to not compromise too much on ease of learning.
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Here's how to ride out the inevitable drops your stocks will take
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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The social networking site that's more networking than social wants to go public.
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Nick Halstead has pointed out a website, written in PHP he's created to help make a little bit of sense out of the links that go flying past in your twitter client - tweetmeme.   What is it? It tracks the public timeline from twitter and picks up any links that get posted. It then follows each link to find final destination and then categorizes the content into blogs / video / images / audio. This project really shows what is possible using PHP if you know what you are doing.   Most of the work was done by another developer, Stuart Dallas as one of four that worked on the project together. It's written in PHP5 and uses only about 20 PHP files to get the job done. You can also check out the launch post over on tweetmeme's blog for more information on the service.
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A word game that has proved hugely popular with Facebook members could soon disappear.
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By Randy Myers, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.  Jun. 10--In the no-holds-barred blogosphere, every voice can be raised.  But not everyone cares to listen.
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Don't let a will get in the way.
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As I said above I'm glued to the TV, but I'm also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I'm subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I've been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They're all getting started, and eventually I'm pretty sure they'll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he's on Twitter and sometimes I'm watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn't it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there's no doubt that soon we'll be doing that. We're finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long. With the help of a few members of the community Yahoo can get there first. BTW, I read on the NY Times site that Yahoo is going to open up more to developers. Hmmm. If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run it in MSM. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don't seem very serious about it.
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I see that Cory Doctorow has made another panicked grab at relevancy once again! His most recent InformationWeek article, How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community, is his latest exercise in self-deception where he tries convincing himself that he knows something about the hip, happenin' thang we call the Innanet.        That Cory has little useful knowledge of keeping hostile jerks from taking over online communities is proven most aptly and amusingly by the way he chose to keep hostile jerks from taking over his weblog BoingBoing: he destroyed its community by shutting off its comments system.
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Despite having both a Myspace and Facebook page, the only social networking site I&#8217;ve really stuck too is Twitter.com. Have you used Twitter? It&#8217;s basically a website that lets you post &#8220;tweets&#8221; or little status updates about what you&#8217;re currently doign. You can twitter from the computer or from your mobile phone. You can subscribe to [...]
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As anyone that's worked with a programming language for a long time knows, you get to know the ins and outs of it pretty well. You get a good feel for how it all works and how feel confident in your skills with it. But what happens if you decide to move on and leave the relationship? Check out this take on just such a situation from the Yet Another Web Development Blog.   We've been together for about five years now. I've had a lot of good times and I've really enjoyed being with you. However, the more we work together, the more concerned I get about our future. I'm sorry, but you don't have the elegance that inspires me to want marry you. I think it's time we broke up.   Some of the reasons given for moving on is PHP's seeming identity crisis, consistency in function names/functionality, and performance issues that were just too much.    Despite being a bit anti-PHP, it's still a well-written piece. Check it out...
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What social web services do you get the most out of? And which ones are just a waste of venture capital? We want to know. In Monkey Bites.