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Chris › Likes
Fwd: "I pronounce you husband and wife. You may now update your relationship status." - http://www.youtube.com/watch... (via http://friendfeed.com/the-fun...)
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Roman Zolotarev, Chris and Alex Schleber liked this
:-) lol
- TrafficBug
Part of the reason Twitter succeeded was that they didn't have many super-smart engineers who rushed to add a bunch of features. They were almost forced to keep the site simple for many years..
Roberto Bonini, Nia, Chris and 30 other people liked this
There are techniques out there to slow things down if you have too many super-smart engineers. If three-martini lunches don't work, try making them use PHP.
- Bruce Lewis
whoa
- Josh Haley
:-) Couldn't resist.
- Bruce Lewis
for 3 years and they are making subtle changes.
- ashish
I think he's saying they didn't have too many really good chefs in the kitchen making you too much food.
- Mattie Kenny
from fftogo
Does that mean that super smart people tend to make changes in the system?
- ashish
Your comment sounds like a fact, but it's just an opinion right? I don't think the site's simplicity was an accident or just a case of Twitter not having enough SSE power. There's a post from 2005 from @Ev, with rule #1 "Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful." http://evhead.com/2005... Seems like Twitter's gone out of their way to uphold that rule from the start.
- Adam Kazwell
This seems like a simplification of what could have happened..I feel simplicity was the only option because they were busy getting their back-end infrastructure right...resolving all those fail-whales in the initial stages must have taken a ton of effort...
- Mahesh CR
Adam, agree it is just an opinion... not fact. I should rephrase that. Mahesh, my point exactly if they had some backend engineers they would not have that much trouble with the backend infrastructure...
- Bindu Reddy
You use friendfeed don't you? That's got a lot of features and hasn't evolved that much since the beginning.
- Richard A.
Less is more
- Ozkan Altuner
from iPhone
I dunno, its probably lucky more than anything the Twitter development team always struck me as ad hoc and accidental about features.most real innovation ie replies, hashtags etc driven by users and other things like retweets messed up when "coded"
- WarLord
Richard, when FF was being worked on there was a lot of iteration and change. I suspect the FF team is not working on it right now....
- Bindu Reddy
I think they were too busy trying to keep Twitter online to worry about new features. Fail to the Whale.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
WarLord - yes you are right about the Twitter innovation being driven by users
- Bindu Reddy
My impression was that Twitter started off as a proof-of-concept project that blew up way beyond what the creators initially envisioned.
- Victor Ganata
Pet rocks and hula hoops also succeeded. I'm not sure anyone has figured out the formula for what will be popular at any given point in time.
- Cristo
Victor I often speculated that Ev was playing when he came up with Twitter and thats why the selling thing is such a dance - really just his hobby that got out of control...
- WarLord
Cristo - agree. I am just making an observation /stating my opinion after the fact.. WarLord, I thought Jack Dorsey was the guy who came up with twitter
- Bindu Reddy
Bindu, you're likely correct I thought it was ev and biz
- WarLord
Originally, I thought Twitter was just one of many incubation companies that Evan Williams was funding. He stepped in when it seemed like it was becoming successful. I wonder what happened to the others.
- Cristo
The others were not successful or probably were abandoned to focus all efforts on Twitter? Randomly speculating :)
- Bindu Reddy
nicely put Bindu.
- Mehmet Aydin
Pity not having Super Smart Engineers didn't work well for friendster. :-)
- Piaw Na
Some things succeed despite not being great, and others fail despite being great. A lot of it is timing, but I wouldn't aim to emulate the success of things that succeeded despite not being technologically advanced. E.g. Just because Windows was a huge success, doesn't mean you should create bad user interface in order to succeed. It wasn't the element that caused it to succeed.
- Cristo
Piaw Na - Ha, the standard confusion between co-relation and causation :))... Cristo, completely agree with your point..
- Bindu Reddy
I'm liking this post because of Bruce Lewis's first comment, not because I endorse the belief that Twitter's engineers aren't super-smart :)
- Tudor Bosman
Tudor - this is my lame attempt at posting a rant about super-smart engineers :)
- Bindu Reddy
Bindu, what are you? :)
- Cristo
Cristo, Not a super-smart engineer....
- Bindu Reddy
You're just saying that because you want to be successful like Twitter. ;)
- Cristo
Biting off more than you can chew and being the lucky one who was able to chew through all the crap doesn't make you sucessful, just lucky. Twitter isn't sucessful yet. It's still in a fad stage. It only got there because some people with names started using it and it became hip. Fads come and go, let's see if Twitter is still sucessful in 12 months before giving them a smilie stamp on the hand.
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
Cristo - yes I am trying desperately to understand and replicate Twitter's success :) But Johnny says they are still a fad. So I guess my attempts are meaningless anyways.
- Bindu Reddy
I by no means implied that their experience shouldn't be studied or admired, just it's they are still a boat rocking on the sea of trends looking for a harbour. If you want to be infamous, make something simple and get a lot of celebs to use it... Beyond that, I got nothing
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
I just want to emulate Johnny's success. Still trying to grow a beard I can shave, and then I'll do a radio show on social media. ;)
- Cristo
Doh! It never occurred to me until now.. Of course you have to make something really really simple if you want celebs to use it. :)
- Bindu Reddy
If you can't get a celeb to answer what something is in a soundbite to Oprah, you have to do it the old fashion way... which takes longer. Souffles are lovely but collapse when out of the oven to long... Christmas cake lasts for years...
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
Yup. Probably Likaholix is too complicated for Ashton Kutcher. Need something like Older-womenholix. :)
- Cristo
Demi isn't going to be pleased...
- Bindu Reddy
Burn!!!!
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
Johnny, did you hurt yourself?
- Cristo
If you really want to know, here is the secret. Write on a whiteboard the word 'Why'. The underneath write three words 'Hardcore', 'Casual' and 'Walmart'. Now, under them write a single sentence for each telling them how they would use it and why. Depending how many of the three you can explain, that's your audience. If my wife (Casual) and my sister (Walmart) can understand it, you have a winner. 1 sentence each...
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
I will say this: people say that if you have more users than your system can handle, it's "a good problem to have". I think Twitter should serve as a cautionary tale that it's not always a good problem to have; Twitter spent a lot of time and engineering effort dealing with scalability problems brought about by their success. They did emerge successfully, and maybe this is proof that...
more...
- Tudor Bosman
Tudor, you may be right or you may be wrong about it being a cautionary tale. It's possible that playing hard-to-get is a good strategy for cementing user loyalty. It's possible that twitter outages had the same psychological effect as someone playing hard-to-get. I don't know how one would go about testing that hypothesis, though.
- Bruce Lewis
I think what's interesting is why other similar services that existed before Twitter failed and no longer exist. Was it really just the complexity of those services? It really does seem like it was a timing issue. I'd rather be lucky, than actually good, I guess :D
- Victor Ganata
Twitter is a success?
- Fulaan, inna Hebel
Maybe it's the times. It think we've gotten used to setting the bar really low, and have defined success as not having failed (yet) :)
- Victor Ganata
Hey, it's 1996 again!
- Andrew C
And Victor, there were social networks before Facebook. Heck, there was Sixdegrees long long before Friendster and Myspace, but Sixdegrees died like a dog. Timing definitely matters.
- Andrew C
I think behind the scenes, the work Evan Williams, Chris Sacca, Fred Wilson and others have done to make strategic decisions and evangelize to celebrities and traditional media is paying off. The service is what it is, but I think it's been highly (and intelligently) leveraged.
- Cristo
Andrew, I don't think it's a matter of timing, Friendster had crap engineers, as did six degrees. None of those sites scaled. Ebay had outages early on as well, but the business kept going and growing anyway.
- Piaw Na
Has Friendster failed? It's actually still continuing to grow in Southeast Asia if you believe the numbers.
- Victor Ganata
Yes, it has failed in the none of the initial investors/employees got anything like the payback they hoped for.
- Piaw Na
That, again, seems more like a timing issue. The new investors seem to be doing OK. And as far as I can tell, it still looks like the same technology.
- Victor Ganata
I think Friendster managed to get a handle on their scaling eventually. It was too late in the US by that time, though. I don't remember Sixdegrees very well. I used it too infrequently to notice outages...
- Andrew C
Friendster was unusably slow for a while. It didn't just have outages. If Twitter had those kinds of problems, I think we'd be talking about a different micro-blogging service today.
- Cristo
no actually they had very smart engineers , who understood the concept "less is more" , same here in FF :)-
- Peter Dawson
I've always thought Twitter embodied the philosophy of doing only one thing, and doing it well (or at least trying to.) But I really think--as in most cases of technology--that the social phenomena and their implications are much more significant than the underlying tech itself.
- Victor Ganata
I think Cristo's and Victor's thoughts are square on. One thing to add: the role of the SMS features shouldn't be underestimated (remember the twitter get's protester out of jail type stories that cross-over into mainstream news.) So, twitter had the mind-shared and evangelism of the SXSW crowd which helped create a critical mass of a certain fervent breed of user and it fanned out enough to get influencers in the politics/news/celebrity business.
- Micah Wittman
ahhhhhh.. I see that some1 remembers the SXSW luanch. On that day it was said the nay sayers said "oh no-- not another micro bloggin tool" !! :)-
- Peter Dawson
It's what I read in the history books... and we all know who writes those texts ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- Micah Wittman
It's not clear to me that Twitter did one thing only well -- obvious scalability issues aside, I think a lot of Twitter's success can be chalked up to timing, although I will give them credit for the 'follow' feature which distinguished them from many other sms-to-web gateways that existed before. Still, I dislike a huge volume of human communication taking place over a proprietary...
more...
- Ray Cromwell
Twitter Account Suspensions - http://www.tweetlaterblog.com/twitter...
Chris liked this
Mari - thank you for sharing this. Wondered what had happened! Hopefully, it gets fixed soon.
- Joe High
RT @douglasi: chart explaining Twitter @ replies policy changes http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... [good explanation of a dumb situation #fixreplies]
Chris liked this
Jesse Ventura offers to 'Waterboard' Dick Cheney [Vids] - http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter...
Chris, Freddie Benjamin, Matthew Gifford and Tierre Brundige liked this
It could be the ultimate waterboard smackdown. Cheney can climb up on a ladder and defend himself from Jesse with a chainsaw. I suppose there could be a WWF, World Waterboarding Federation.
- Chuck Baggett
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