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Todd Cochrane › Comments
Though I've missed being online, it's been great spending time w/ family from a beautiful area back East.
sally stokhamer, Mike Chelen, Jill and 13 other people liked this
What a Beautiful photo, where is "back east?"
- Vickie Wyman
Blue Ridge Mountains... gorgeous country. I'm not well versed on the geography out there.
- Arleen Anderson
Very Nice!
- Frank King
cute cabin, almost looks like a painting :) twitter(at)locspoc
- Loc
I've been to this cabin before just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is my favorite photo of it... exactly as I remember it! Courtesy of planetware.com You know me and my CrackBerry don't take shots this good!
- Arleen Anderson
This place looks like its inhabited by Grizzly Adams :)
- Arnold Aranez
How can you afford to go back east when you owe people so much money?
- Todd Cochrane
It's - Ukraine? :)))
- Victor
My Google Profile - http://www.google.com/profile...
My Profile on Google
- Todd Cochrane
I don’t feel safe with Wordpress, hackers broke in and took things - http://scobleizer.com/2009...
carl morris, Tyson Key, Susan Beebe and 87 other people liked this
Well, if you have fixed the hole by upgrading; you should feel a lot safer now. I guess strong user adoption does bring the wrong kind of attention.
- Anindya Chatterjee
Anindya: we're watching. Looks like they haven't gotten back in since the upgrade and some of the other changes we made. Knock on wood.
- Robert Scoble
I'm very tempted to switch to a SixApart install. As a Perl programmer I'd be much more familiar with the backend.
- Jesse Stay
Robert, btw, I'm sure between all your users you can find a backup. I have a bunch via Google Reader I could get to Rackspace to import for you. I'm sure others have even older entries than I have. Let us know if you want help restoring the old scobleizer.com!
- Jesse Stay
robert - i can tell you this - you need to watch it like a hawk - when i thought i was safe - i wasn't - InsideTransit continues to get hit - and I still believe there is some patches and stuff that RS can do as well - the bigger issue is what's on the server - because that's where they put the shells and then they can do whatever they want.
- Allen Stern
Not cool, hopefully things will work out.
- Kim Landwehr
Jesse: luckily it was July and August, when I wasn't doing much blogging. No biggie. Thanks. Allen: yes, Rackspace Cloud has a security team now and they are actively looking at ways to make Wordpress safer for our customers. It really sucks getting hacked. Let me know if you find any other ways to protect the systems.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: Yea getting hacked sucks. My early days with my blog aboutonlinematters.com I got hacked and luckily my ISP had a backup. Since then I have treated my Wordpress blog like any dev site - with a subversion repository and complete backup. But there are days... like today... when I think strongly about a platform like typepad.
- Arthur Coleman
what i have found is locking down the files helps - but you need to ftp into your site and make sure that nothing has been edited or added - in my case, on all my sites, the hackers put files all over that were base64 files - and what they do is include them into WP or they just run them direct - nearly a full shell. i've asked RS to create a way so that i can be notified of any changes to files - they say it's too heavy to run.
- Allen Stern
Robert, I just miss the traffic from your "You are SO Unfollowed!" article. (one of the casualties) ;-)
- Jesse Stay
There's a lot of great info they deleted - I'm a little ticked they would be completely insensitive like that to prove a security flaw. It affected much more than just you.
- Jesse Stay
Jesse: yeah, that's probably the one blog that I miss. It's also the one that got me to notice they deleted a couple of months.
- Robert Scoble
Jesse: that still is cached over on Google at http://74.125.155.132/search...
- Robert Scoble
No way "You are SO unfollowed" is out? I loved that one! :-( thanks for the cache Robert
- Sofia @ SoMaFusion
If you have no time to take care of yuors blog, maybe it's better if you choose the pro offer from wordpress.com ( I think scobleizer.com can have the minimum requirement to stay there).
- wolly
here it the VIP hosting http://en.wordpress.com/vip-hos...
- wolly
wolly: it's not just about time, attacks come from all directions so you've gotta have a holistic approach to security. How many of you regularly change passwords and make sure they are really good ones? (Twitter got broken into not because of hacks, but because they didn't practice good password security).
- Robert Scoble
It saddens me: it is morally reprehensible your hosting company convinced you to switch with the seduction of plugins and customization without emphasizing or handling the increased responsibility of upgrades. Your blog was not unique and not a special target, the worms sweep across millions of blogs indiscriminately and hit whatever is vulnerable. If your host is lax in upgrading, the...
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- Matt Mullenweg
that's true :-) I use password very strange and very verylong that I cannot remember and I use a service like clipperz.com to login.
- wolly
wolly, Robert was hosted on WordPress.com for about 4 years -- he was actually the very first VIP. Although there were dozens of security updates to WordPress in that time, his blog never had a problem because it was always up-to-date. He only switched away a few months ago.
- Matt Mullenweg
Ciao Matt :-) I didn't know that, so scoble come back to the light side :)
- wolly
Matt: yup, that's true. I've learned my lesson. Running your own servers are a lot harder than just having them hosted on Wordpress.com.
- Robert Scoble
To be frank, it completely breaks whatever trust I had in Rackspace.
- Matt Mullenweg
But Matt, I've been talking with many blog owners, including at TechCrunch, and they say that Wordpress' updates break their custom plugins. That's why they don't upgrade immediately. So, sounds like Wordpress has a mess on its hands that the hosted version of Wordpress didn't have (I couldn't run a lot of plugins and video embeds and other fun things on the hosted version of Wordpress). So, to blame it on my hoster/employer (Rackspace) exclusively isn't really a good attitude either.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, It happens. We were hacked too. My observations lead me to believe that this summer was the worst in a long time. Its a war and its going to be a war until the attitude towards hackers changes. Let's stop being fascinated in the least bit by how they do it (this goes towards Kevin Mitnick and his supporters- I don't ever want to pay good money to read about your scams on the...
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- Melanie Reed
Matt's got a point that with greater power (self-hosting) comes greater responsibility (more need to keep an eye on security), but I think to say that Scoble's blog was not a special target is a bit disingenuous. High-profile sites are always a higher-value target.
- Rachel Luxemburg
Matt: I think you need to really look at all the damage that's being done to a wide range of sites, many of which are NOT hosted at Rackspace, before throwing more barbs. That's bull. Sorry. But I added a link to this conversation to my blog so people could see your point of view.
- Robert Scoble
If a plugin is preventing you from upgrading (did it?) then let's figure out how to fix that plugin. All I can do in WordPress is build in the notices (your blog was asking you to upgrade for months) and the one-click updates for both core and plugins. I agree it's not your (Robert Scoble's) fault because I don't think you made the conscious decision to take on the increased responsibility.
- Matt Mullenweg
Matt: the reputation around the Net is that upgrades on Wordpress break things. This wasn't a Rackspace recommendation. It's also a problem with all upgrades. I've gotten hosed by upgrades elsewhere. Look at all the people upgrading to Snow Leopard who are having things break.
- Robert Scoble
Matt: TechCrunch hasn't upgraded its blog either and it wasn't hosted on Rackspace (at least not until a couple of days ago).
- Robert Scoble
I'm not saying there isn't lots of misinformation around the net, I'm saying "how can I help your blog, please." If it's a plugin preventing you from upgrading, let me know the plugin and we'll fix it even if we didn't write it. That's the beauty of open source.
- Matt Mullenweg
Robert -- Avoiding upgrades because they're annoying to deal with isn't a viable longterm strategy.
- Rachel Luxemburg
they need to take care of Scoble's blog, well for he is a VIP and the smashing they would have would do a lot of damage to your customer base and otherwise, would they reply to an ordinary guy say like me? i think not,well wordpress/automattic is having their tough moments, hope things get well and they get their repute back
- testbeta
Matt - you blaming Rackspace for security vulnerabilities in YOUR software platform is kinda like blaming Dell when a Windows box gets hacked. I think you are being irrational.
- Rob La Gesse
Matt: in my case it was the REPUTATION of Wordpress's upgrades that was keeping me from upgrading. I was waiting to see what other people reported broke. I didn't realize the severity of the security problems. But, I am now upgrading automatically. So I'm fixed. But you still have a reputation problem. Lots of people are reporting things break when they upgrade.
- Robert Scoble
Rob, I'm not blaming them. I'm saying it's the responsibility of any host, of any software, to stay up to date. If there was a SSH vulnerability on Robert's box I would say the same thing. Software updates are inevitable, there is no such thing as bug-free code, so staying up to date is a must.
- Matt Mullenweg
Isn't all this open source code? If it's broken, why not fix it? Doesn't everyone have the responsibility to do that? It's not any one source's fault in that case.
- Jesse Stay
Matt - I agree with you. So make Wordpress upgrades SAFE, automatic AND do some internal validation of plugin code to let users know they may be running something that is potentially insecure.
- Rob La Gesse
Matt, agreed. Not when its turned out as fast as people are yelling for it. People can't have it both ways.
- Melanie Reed
Matt: all Rackspace was providing to me was a Linux host. I was responsible for getting my upgades done on anything I ran on that system. But now we have a team making sure we're following best practices. That is NOT Rackspace's problem, though. That's like blaming Microsoft for a bug in Adobe software.
- Robert Scoble
I never listen to the reputation, I always upgrade as a security upgrade is out, and if a plugin doesn't work or I deactivate it or I fix it. Security is much more important than a plugin and Matt knows how many plugins has my blog (when he looked my backend he was very sad ad he said that it was the first time for him to see so many plugin in a blog :-) ) To have a self host blog it's difficult and time expensive.
- wolly
There are several very useful plugins specifically addressing security issues; and monitoring WP for suspicious activities (both on file and database level). Here are some articles with tips to harden your blog http://bit.ly/sZgh6 (delicious bookmarks). I only install plugins from authors from whom I know that they implement top level php; no breaking of upgrades on my 3 WP blogs has taken place (2.7-2.8-2.8.4)
- Jeroen De Miranda
Yeah, plugin issues are the responsibility of the plugin developer, not Wordpress's. I don't see how this is Wordpress's or Rackspace's fault.
- Jesse Stay
By the way, Matt, Sheamus, over on my comments on my blog, says he has the latest upgrades in place and he's still being broken into. You might help him figure out how the hackers are breaking in still.
- Robert Scoble
Sorry, I was under the impression Rackspace had recommended you move away from WordPress.com and taken responsibility for the system. I was worried about your blog -- I emailed you about this in August but never heard back. It breaks my heart when someone's WordPress gets compromised.
- Matt Mullenweg
I understand the feeling though - if people are still being broken into after being told a fix was made, especially if you're not a developer, that can be a little scary. I'd look to other solutions in that case if it were me, and it's no one's fault. It's just perception and fear, very valid fear.
- Jesse Stay
I do believe there is a false sense of securty that WORDPRESS fosters by hosting plugins. I think many assume that because they download the pluging VIA Wordpress, and FROM Wordpress, it is somehow vetted.
- Rob La Gesse
Matt: no. I wanted to move to my own install of Wordpress so that I could run many more plugins and start doing stuff other professional bloggers were doing. I am learning very quickly just how much work goes on behind the scenes to make sure my words were protected.
- Robert Scoble
Once you've been hacked once if you don't clean up every trace (preferably a systems person does this) it's very likely something is left that allows the spammers to easily break back in, regardless of what version you're on. That's why the trouble with upgrading is worth it, it's much, much less than the trouble of fixing a hacked blog.
- Matt Mullenweg
Jesse: yeah, at Microsoft when a box got broken into they wouldn't let you use it anymore. They forced you to reinstall it with all patches loaded. They assumed that it was compromised and that someone stuck a back door in somewhere. That's a lot of work too.
- Robert Scoble
install either wp-backup or wp-dbmanager and configure database backup: every day; download to your local pc (or to a system other than your hosting provider); run a check once a month to see whether you can reconstruct the blog in case of calamity, That is my procedure; works fine.
- Jeroen De Miranda
if a commoner gets hacked, then he should move to wordpress.com services or what?
- testbeta
they should just make it not have any security holes!
- Mark
Robert, if you like I'd be happy to host your blog for you (and I'm on Rackspace servers). I can keep it secure as well. I'd only ask some mention of SocialToo somewhere (or payment of some form in order to cover the cost of bandwidth).
- Jesse Stay
I would also be able to keep it backed up for you.
- Jesse Stay
So the take away messages are: 1) hosting services like Rackspace support the hardware and OS layer and you're are on your own for everything else, 2) maintaining your own website is difficult work, even for experienced IT professionals, 3) social media experts may not really know how to use the social media tools they are recommending, and 4) while hosted applications like Wordpress.com provide less flexibility, they take less effort and can be more reliable for the average small business.
- Steve Wilhelm
I'll also install any plugins you're interested in trying
- Jesse Stay
Jesse: in my case, I now have a team of the top security guys at Rackspace working on it and making sure my system is up to date and backed up. They also are learning a lot about this and other people who have had problems and are building a list of best practices.
- Robert Scoble
This is eventually why I didn't go with Mosso. The service looks good, but you still have to manage your app yourself which opens you up to problems like you've experienced. It would be cool if they offered another layer of management on top so apps could be completely hands free.
- Todd Hoff
the alternative (i.e. strong vetting of all plugins) would turn the whole WordPress ecosphere into something such as Ning.... only some 300 addons (as far as I know); little flexibility very intransparent how to get your addin accepted .... Not an attractive model for me....
- Jeroen De Miranda
Robert, excellent - just wanted to make sure the offer was out there. Maybe that could be a tiered service for Rackspace, although I'm not sure it's something Rackspace wants to get into. Bluehost barely makes any money off of that type of service.
- Jesse Stay
Steve: I think that's a reasonable set of assumptions. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. When I was on Wordpress.com I was always jealous of blogs that were able to run the latest plugins and use the latest embed codes from various sites.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, it's even more fun when you can customize the plugins and themes as a developer. :-)
- Jesse Stay
@testbeta wrdpress.com is a very good choice if you don't have time or you don't know how to manage security on yors self hosted blog
- wolly
wolly: that takes out the open source fun part ;) well i have nothing much to do on my blogs so i keep mine updated ;)
- testbeta
I agree with you :-) but many people love blogging non update theirs blogs :-)
- wolly
when my sites were hacked - a wordpress employee reached out to me- i dont remember her name but we sent a few emails - i could write for days about what happened to my 5 sites - my take is simple - i think the issues are a combo of rackspace (my host) and wordpress (my software) - i can tell you this - in 3+ yrs on drupal, i was NEVER hacked. and Matt is right - the real issue is that...
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- Allen Stern
Allen - what version of WP are you running today?
- Rob La Gesse
2.8.4 on all of them
- Allen Stern
Allen - good :)
- Rob La Gesse
If there's a shell script on the same server as you, even if it's not your account, everything on that server is at risk regardless of the software or its version.
- Matt Mullenweg
Matt - that is NOT true
- Rob La Gesse
I would switch to a new server if I were infected at this point.
- Jesse Stay
Properly configured, user space can be isolated and these scripts cannot cross-pollinate.
- Rob La Gesse
It can be -- but publish a shell login on your server and we'll see. ;) The right answer is to scrub that sort of access.
- Matt Mullenweg
Matt - that comment on the "shell script" is silly. What are you actually trying to say?
- Robert J Taylor
Some sort of backdoor that allows a remote user to execute code -- it's super common.
- Matt Mullenweg
rob/matt - that wsa one of the biggest issues with my RS account - i had all the sites together in one "client" so when they hacked one - they were able to move around with their shell script into all my other sites - now each site is in a sep. "client" so the damage can only hurt me on one site - and believe me it does hurt :( i believe insidetransit and centernetworks are hit in google
- Allen Stern
@Scobleizer I'm sticking with @wordpress it doesn't worry me that much, plus I always update and have backups of db and site emailed to me
- Justin Yost
Allen - that was within one user space though. So what I stated above still stands true.
- Rob La Gesse
Allen and Robert are big enough that if they had a problem they could contact us and we'd help them, though as far as I know neither did, but I worry a lot more about smaller folks who get hit in the same way. The knowledge for how to properly clean up after a hack is more systems than software and not widespread.
- Matt Mullenweg
As Allen mentioned above, he did have a conversation with Wordpress.
- Rob La Gesse
matt - thanks for putting me in the same category as robert! *blush* - i did reach out to you - and your security guy was helping me big time - it seemed to turn out that the WP Contact Form 7 was the thing that caused it to start - i didn't document it all online because the security guy wanted time to get the plugin developer to fix the upload hole. - btw his name was mark jaquith and he was great
- Allen Stern
So why not some scheme where Wordpress vets a plugin and "blesses it" - perhaps a small charge for this service? As long as Wordpress is advertising plugins on the dashboard I think there ample reason to hold Wordpress to some level of accountability for those plugins
- Rob La Gesse
rob - that's what i told mark - they should offer that service for a tiny fee - stamp a "certified" stamp on it.
- Allen Stern
Just updated all my sites, doesnt look I was hit.
- sean percival
sean - no one would hit you - they know you would lala all over them
- Allen Stern
sean - happy for you!
- Rob La Gesse
I've read almost all of the comments here, not hearing these mentioned once: Robert did not backup, kept the default 'admin' username and failed to update. These are three of the most basic security measures out there. Not blaming it on Robert, because we all fail on this sometimes, but these basics really are important!
- Abounding Media
http://twitter.com/markjaq... warning of Mark in April - kept me away from WP contact form 7
- Jeroen De Miranda
Abounding: yup. And the lesson here is don't host your own version of Wordpress unless you have a security team making sure you're doing it right and backing up (something I never did on Wordpress.com, by the way). Oh, and Twitter taught us that even if you do all of that you've gotta make sure you pick great passwords and think through ways that social hacks could be done to get into your accounts.
- Robert Scoble
I've written a much longer post on this: http://wordpress.org/develop...
- Matt Mullenweg
http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2008... some great tips of Mark Jaquith on writing secure plugins - I use these and other tips when scanning the PHP code of new plugins that I intend to use (before deploying them)
- Jeroen De Miranda
Jeroen, thanks for posting that. I've had phishers getting into one of my WP installs recently, but couldn't tell which plugin it was. I deactivated two plugins, including CF7, the other day, and haven't had any more problems. And a shoutout to Ryan Boren on the WP dev team for helping me to de-infect.
- John Craft
Robert: Welcome to the world of web development for impatient users and disgruntled hackers
- Melanie Reed
http://wordpress.org/develop... great post of Matt Mullenweg about WordPress security!
- Jeroen De Miranda
john - the CF7 is what killed me a few months ago - it's because the form allows uploads even if you don't actually have them on - i believe they patched it but i have not gone back there.
- Allen Stern
anybody know if a little smily face appearing in the lower right hand corner of ones footer is a sign of a compromise on a self hosted wp blog?
- Richard Reeve
John, your are welcome! SQL injects attacks specifically exploit data entry fields used by the plugin; one should at least scan the PHP code of these plugins, and look at what kind of escape functions are used around handling of the data entry.
- Jeroen De Miranda
"it's because the form allows uploads even if you don't actually have them on" - wow. That's bad.
- John Craft
Richard is wp-stats smily :-)
- wolly
"anybody know if a little smily face appearing in the lower right hand corner of ones footer is a sign of a compromise on a self hosted wp blog?" - if you didn't put it there, it probably is. In your admin go to appearance, theme editor, and read the footer.php file.
- John Craft
Richard - are you using the WordPress.com Stats plugin?
- Andre Natta
some plugins worth considering to install are: wp-exploit-scanner, wordpress file monitor, WP security scan, anti virus
- Jeroen De Miranda
I don't understand why people are worried about a plugin breaking when it comes to upgrading WordPress. If a plugin does break, disable it for the time being. I rather have a secure installation of WordPress running and would worry about fixing the plugin afterwards.
- Jason Hansen
Hmmmm . . . I run WP Stats, but see no smiley face.
- John Craft
ah...thanks folks...stats it is. phew...so I'm not paranoid...
- Richard Reeve
There appears to be some a-holes who can break into wordpress blogs very easily. I'm not sure at this point that the new Wordpress Thesis blog that I'm interested in getting is safe either. There is some security issues with Wordpress and their incompetence to fix the problem is growing every year. They keep coming out with new versions to replace the old versions yet they still have a problem. This is serious guys.
- Jeunelle Foster
The problem with WordPress is that it forces you to upgrade. Imagine if Microsoft forced everybody to upgrade to Vista/Windows 7 in order to get their security holes plugged. WordPress should release security patches for the current and at least for the previous version.
- Nikolay Kolev
They dont force you to upgrade. If you dont want to patch, you can leave it at the current version ( but with a risk )
- Kashif Khan
Where's the patch for the 2.7 version then?
- Nikolay Kolev
Their versioning strategy bumps up numbers even for patches . And how many versions behind should they support ?
- Kashif Khan
Many of the WordPress security issues are not coming from the WordPress itself, but from the poorly written WordPress plugins. I think it would be nice if Automattic starts an "Automattic Certified" program giving blog owners the peace of mind they need. Every hacker can upload a plugin at WordPress.org, advertise it as something great, bloggers install it, see that it's nothing as advertised, uninstall it, but the WordPress instances are already hacked.
- Nikolay Kolev
Plugins are open source and free and nobody (well, with some exceptions) would pay to get their free plugin certified. The only way to do this is by having a community review process, based on some credibility score and voter authority system where 1,000 fake hacker accounts won't, for example, outweigh Matt's or Mark's votes.
- Nikolay Kolev
part of the problem is the cry wolf syndrome - if i updated every day wordpress had a security problem i'd want to be salaried on the payroll :D Wordpress needs some sort of alert notification - twitter or something that indicates if there's an update AND the severity and if its severe enough sends it to my phone.
- mal
let me play the other side of the coin - i've been using vbulletin for my forums for probably more than 5 years - and it's never once been hacked - why is this - is it because it's paid? is it just more secure? would love to get some input on why wordpress seems to be the attacker's gold.
- Allen Stern
@allenstern because it pays back better to have wp hacked
- A.T.
Another devil - I have clients using Expression Engine for years (with plugins) and haven't had a problem either. Checking security sites, EE has had very few vs the many with WP and some with Drupal. Matts suggestion that one hosts with him to avoid problems and keep updated just isn't in the cards for business sites. Just too many vulnerabilities with WP over the years for me to recommend it.
- PXLated
i can tell you that within 2 days of moving from drupal to wp, my sites were hacked - all of them - and it made me seriously question the move - the reasons i moved were because wp is a bit easier to edit/code than drupal and because the admin panel in wordpress is awesome compared to the crap panel in drupal - i wrote up a whole post about why i moved - i'd like to see matt write a post about their qa and security procedures for their releases
- Allen Stern
Alen, once Drupal 7 get released, you may actually go back. :)
- Nikolay Kolev
Robert - If I were you I'd move away from Wordpress and fast. Its security record is dire and has been for ages. Other solutions are a lot more stable, whereas Wordpress seems to have security bugs every second week. Why anyone puts up with it is really beyond me. I moved to MovableType and haven't had to worry about caching issues or security problems
- Michele Neylon
#somethingpersonal WP calls you "technical evengelist", Robert. When you say «Yes, I didn’t have a backup. I should learn to do backups» I call you a mediawhore. Nothing TECH-NI-CAL, just bulled ego. Learn Security, Performance, Reliability, you ignorant piece.
- Капитан Сильвер Буллет
Robert - "the reputation around the Net is that upgrades on Wordpress break things" I'm sorry but that's just not true, I use many many plugins across about 20 sites and I've only ever ONCE had a plugin break during a WP upgrade.
- John O'Nolan
Definitely check if Google Reader has your lost posts - as of a few months ago, it didn't handle deletes very well :)
- Michael Herf
This recent wave of WordPress incidents shows the negative side of using open source software. Matt says that there are many people looking into WordPress' source code, but the problem is that probably half of those people have malicious reasons for doing so.
- Nikolay Kolev
@Matt - why not have a module that adds *automatic* upgrades? The one-click update feature is very nice, but zero clicks is better. With a decent snapshot/rollback system you could update most people securely right away--email them and let them rollback if something breaks.
- Michael Herf
@robert: we might be able to help you recover the lost blog posts if you want. Google Reader has an archive of them and we helped another blogger in the past recover her losses. Let me know if we can help.
- Edwin Khodabakchian
@matt when do you start to care about poor people unlike robert... who can't afford *VIP* i am willing to pay $25+ per month of course with my adsense ads :}
- Imran Jafri
@robert by the way you made one of the worst choice to move away from wordpress.com i think it wasn't price issue rather you wanted to be brand *ambassador* for rackspace which was only possible if you host your blog on their damn servers... if i get enough visitors i would switch to wordpress.com vip without taking 2nd breathe........
- Imran Jafri
I run just a few plugins, and research and vet them first. And upgrade to new WP versions within a week. Look, attacks happen, running self-hosted can get complicated. But this is true with any software or OS
- Bob Morris (polizeros)
from iPhone
Nikolay, it's always better to have more people looking at the code, because a bug that's been found is better than a bug that hasn't. WordPress used to get almost no security problems and people thought it was because it was coded differently, when in fact it was coded far worse than it is today it just didn't have enough users to make it worthwhile to target. Also where many...
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- Matt Mullenweg
Nikolay: I would also push back against your assumption that using Open Source software equals less security. Microsoft Windows and OS X are both closed source and both have security holes - there is a competition each year to help MS and Apple find them and fix them. Both Apple and Microsoft came away with security holes to fix this year. So just because it's open source doesn't...
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- Tim
that's what you get for the fun of installing and hosting your own installation, instead of using "the cloud".
- Ihar Mahaniok
Robert - I recommend WP S3 Backups for backing up your database to off-site storage. Amazon S3 is a great place to host backups of your Wordpress database and is relatively inexpensive. You *always* want backups *off* the server so in case the server is compromised, the backups are still clean. This plugin works like a charm, is automatic and could have saved you. Cheers!
- Scott Jarkoff
anybody know of a test that can be done to see if a wp blog has been compromised? Has a few strange user subscriptions about a week ago...but not noticing any thing else...I did upgrade weeks ago, but soon enough?
- Richard Reeve
bug exploits keep security IT folks in their day job, sad but true.
- Jim Posner
In IT it keeps me busy but the reality is if you update your software on a regular basis you can minimize these from affecting you.
- Rob Cairns
Robert, any chance archive.org has some of your old blog posts? Google Cache?
- drew olanoff
Matt, another thing to note is that Wordpress.com is often blocked in China (even if you have your own custom URL like scobleizer.com). There are advantages to NOT being hosted by Wordpress.com although your point about increased responsibilty for keeping up with security patches is still valid.
- Elliott Ng
Drew: yeah, but what do I do? Just republish them?
- Robert Scoble
from iPhone
Sure why not. Scoble's best of. Reason why I hate stuff on the net sometimes is good stuff gets lost.
- drew olanoff
Give a try to the "WordPress Database Backup" plugin for WordPress and you'll receive regular backups on your email
- Francois Lamotte
Robert, You can get all of your lost blog post html out of Google Reader. I'm not exactly sure how to link Disqus back, maybe it's as simple as re-adding the old posts with the same title/date i.e. Url (I don't use it). Yet another reason to use FULL RSS feeds (instead of summary). See RSS isn't dead.. it's now a backup tool too! (http://ff.im/7JrlC)
- Chris Myles
Wordpress is a great blogging tool. It is however the largest target now - much like how Windows gets a crap-top more virii because it's the most used system. Someone used Drupal as am example of security... well I'm sure if Drupal was anywhere near the scale of usage Wordpress is you'd see hacks for that too.
- Gregory Wild-Smith
Robert: Just repost them with the dates set to the original dates they were posted. Simple, and no-one will ever know ;)
- Gregory Wild-Smith
I have always had a bad feeling about Wordpress. YMMV.
- Gordon Joly
from twhirl
Robert It could be a Rackspace problem and Not a Wordpress Problem. They might to increase there security on the Rackspace!!! You should checck into that!!
- Paul
One of the reasons I waited 2 years to switch from MovableType to WordPress was due to the security issues. I felt that the track record improved over the past year and moved 11 sites over. I can say this I employ a very extensive back up scheme but still worry about it. The ability to upgrade with a single click of a button has made it much easier to upgrade, but I always worry which plugins are going to break as I use a lot of plugins.
- Todd Cochrane
It's interesting to me to see the number of people who are "afraid" to implement a security update because it might break a plugin. I wonder if these are the same people who don't run system updates on Mac or Windows because it might break SIMBL or some other haxie. Your core = your core... without it you're smoked. Case in point: Scoble. If your plugins aren't working after an update, let the author know and request an update, but BY ALL MEANS don't ignore security upgrades.
- Kevin Donahue
hmm... I think that a lot of this conversation is missing something. Most software security updates are usually tested in hosts and thus delayed in their own releases by at the minimum of a week's time usually. This is due to hosting internal testing of patches before rolling it out to all servers. Now, whether or not RS actually performs these types of procedures, I don't know... but I...
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- Ben Hwang
First: I keep my blog up to date. Always. Fuck plugins, I decided that when I made the decision to use WP for my blog that updates would be a priority, only because of all the security issues that I remember from the early early days. Having said that, I have to agree with Robert that the perception with WordPress, despite all the work with auto-updates and in-blog notification is STILL...
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- Christina Warren
from iPod
I am spending the day finally making a back-up of my web space, then the upgrade.
- Sebastian Keil
you are right to not feel safe: when you are on the dominant platform, holes get taken advantage of really fast. At least it being open source you know it will also get plugged fast
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
"what do I do? Just republish them?" - Robert, you can set the published date to the original July or August date in the "new post" form. Where it says "publish immediately," click "edit".
- John Craft
I couldn't disagree more that the reputation is that an upgrade will break a plugin. How many plugins reach into the Wordpress core and screw around with it? Less than 5%? Any examples of plugins that broke w/ 2.8.4?
- beersage
Somebody hacked into my WordPress blog earlier this year as well. It was a bummer because I was working on a draft copy of a blog post that was very rough and had not been edited and they published it. I was on vacation shooting in Chicago and didn't figure it out until several hours after they'd already published it. Fortunately they didn't seem to do anything malicious other than...
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- Thomas Hawk
@Robert: "[Rackspace] are learning a lot about this and other people who have had problems and are building a list of best practices." Is it possible this list is something RS might share?
- John House
@Matt Mullenweg: I do like WordPress (even though we had a public argument with you and another Automattic employee on TechCrunch a while ago) and I am a passionate supporter of open source software - don't get me wrong. But sometimes open source code makes it a bit easier for hackers! For example, one hacker hears about an exploit and without communicating with others, finds the hole independently by just looking into the source code and starts exploiting it on his own.
- Nikolay Kolev
Gregory Wild-Smith Bingo!
- Melanie Reed
Social Media Club blogs got hit as well as several of our personal blogs (still sorting it all out). We try to keep up on most upgrades, but every time we do, simple plugins (like the Event calendar) break. Seems silly, but we have hours of work after each upgrade to try and keep everything intact, and sometimes, we end up downgrading until the 'essential' plugins catch up, which...
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- Kristie Wells
I have 2 wordpress blogs. One on my own domain and one at wordpress central. Still can't get my head around their upgrade gymnastics - may just stick with eBlogger after all.
- Houseofmax
i don't know what will happen in times to come but from the existing platforms, i love wordpress and i am not going anywhere, but that doesn't matter for wordpress right? ;)
- testbeta
Robert, at the end of it is just only your bloody laziness in upgrading that led you here :) Jokes aside, please at least be honest and say you didn't upgradede twice... :p.
- Matteo Flora
Nope. I upgraded to 2.8.4 as soon as it was out but the hackers had already broken in.
- Robert Scoble
from iPhone
The fact that WordPress is currently being exploited doesn't mean that other platforms are immune. For example, the recently discovered XSS issue with Ruby on Rails makes not only blogs, but every unpatched site a target. So, the only issue I'm having is forcing us to upgrade to a new major version without much time to do proper testing (I'm not talking about personal blogs here). I...
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- Nikolay Kolev
So Techdirt was hacked a bit ago. See their reaction: http://www.techdirt.com/article... it is the reality of owning a web site guys - ANY software is hackable if someone really wants in.
- Adam Singer
@Robert: as I see it Wordpress is as vulnerable as any other web app. Upgrading does good, but preemptive security does more and better. I know Matt and he knows I'm in awe with him and Automattic but simply spoken I DON'T TRUST WORDPRESS as I don't trust any other software. A little WebApp Security Firewall (or at least a little .htaccess rules for admin and preemptive locking of...
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- Matteo Flora
i find it interesting, and depressing that people are blaming Rackspace, they're blaming Wordpress, they're blaming Robert, but no one, *no one* seems to be willing to blame the only, ONLY people who deserve blame: the evolutionary failures that attacked Robert's blog.
- John C. Welch
Thanks to your post, I found backdoor Admin in my own blog (created yesterday apparently). Promptly deleted it, upgraded blog and took other measures, which I blogged about
- Adi Rabinovich
@Matt Mullenweg: "so staying up to date is a must. - Matt Mullenweg" You gave the birth to one of the coolest piece of free software on the net, also your community is strong an love-full, you can do some PRs listening to Scoble that is crying, but you couldn't do anything better than you did. Take it easy man, all your competitors still suck. (PS. also a cleaning utility to understand better if everything is ok on our hosts would be cool ;-)
- righini riprova
Matt: What does a user need to provide, in order to be considered for a VIP wordpress.com account?
- Jim Connolly
caveat operator
- Mike Chelen
Take technology out of the picture. Something bad happened by some bad person. Happens every day... it's called crime. If a bad person got into my house because I had a weak lock or left my door unlocked, what do people usually say? "That bad person shouldn't have done that!"? Well, sure, but bad people do bad things... nothing we can do to stop them other than make it harder or...
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- Chris Hearn
I would simply like to reiterate the point that if you're going to put free open source software on a rented web server, you need to either know how to administer it or hire someone to do it for you. Neither Rackspace or Wordpress are to blame here. We discuss this with our clients all the time who view web development as a one off expense, then get upset when their site is hacked because it wasn't maintained.
- JP Maxwell
One more point, I think there are way too many false lines drawn over aras of responsibility - "I'm systems, not a PHP programmer. I'm a PHP programmer, not a Javascript person. I'm a designer, not a programmer or a systems person." If you are a WEB developer or responsible for maintaining hosted WEB applications, you need to know a bit about it all. It simply isn't sufficient to demarcate your knowledge sphere and point your finger at the other guy.
- JP Maxwell
Wow !
- ★ Soner Gönül
Concerned there hasn't been more tech press coverage of the podcast patent. http://www.scripting.com/stories...
Mick Stanic, Scott Jangro, Sam Harrelson and 13 other people liked this
if patents are so important, why wasn't one applied for?
- Steve Gillmor
How would this impact the current podcasting world? Would they sue every podcast publisher out there?
- Fajar Nurdiansyah
Dave I am as well, it has been nagging at me all day long. If someone had tried to pull this crap in 2005-6 then all hell would have broken loose. Now everyone is cowering in the corner.
- Todd Cochrane
no one is cowering, they are just not interested in the story. podcasting is a little bit passée now to them
- Mark
Appears that way to me.
- Todd Cochrane
I mean the big boys, certainly one of the biggest is TechCrunch. They don't exactly cower on stories :p They just are not that bothered about it, to come up with one of Those Biting And Controversial Headlines They Write.
- Mark
Having said that, I think some of the quality journals might have something to say in their Tech section today
- Mark
From what I have read, it appears to be a patent on a platform for delivering podcasting in such a way that the advertising in it could be updated independently to the content. You may deliver a show with an ad, but a year later, that ad may be obsolete or incorrect. The press release appears to focus on the technology of inserting that new advertising material into the shows. So,...
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- Johnny Worthington
Thanks Johnny I was waiting on a someone like yourself to splain it to me (time bankrupt when it comes to legal paper reading)
- Mark Essel
from iPhone
Well Twitter is offline for a bit so I will announce here that a live recording of the Geek News Central Podcast is about to begin
Eric @ CSTechcast.com and Ryan liked this
The problem with this real time feed is the same with Twitter. You have to constantly monitor, and when you're not looking content is gone. The 'pause' button, and "best of day" will be critical in ensuring you're not missing content.
Amira, Ruben Kenig, Hutch Carpenter and 31 other people liked this
Filters, filters, filters. I predict that in a day or two that will be the big story. The scoped filters make this release really interesting.
- Brian Roy
Try lists and filters, does the trick for me.
- Mike Reynolds
Filters are great, but take a lot of time to setup - the constantly monitor will be a challenge for a lot of people.
- Tony
I kinda got used to "real-time" on Friendfeed by choosing the "real-time" option every so often on the original interface, just going to be a matter of adapting.
- Ed Richardson
JustSignal is a solution for all of this. Yay, Brian
- Francine Hardaway
Maybe a smart filter creator that works like the suggested people to follow and help you build them out would be a killer feature.
- Tony
I think we need some advanced feed settings, so we can set criteria which tells FF or Twitter what we're most interested, and it puts that content (either from specific people or topics) into a cache for us to review at our leisure.
- DanielthePoet
This isn't that different to Twitter or any other similar service. You have to keep monitoring the stream if you want to stay on top of it all. Being able to pause the stream is handy though.
- Paul Jacobson
rooms + filters
- andy brudtkuhl
But JustSignal is going to have to hold more posts
- Francine Hardaway
lists, filters, and private feeds
- Damian Holmes
As I've said three times, this is good for breaking news, but not for "real" life
- Francine Hardaway
you can set keyword search in your filters that may help with not missing something - still tons of room for semantic value there.
- Yann Ropars
The problem is, if I want to comment, I have to throw my pebble in Jeremiah's stream, and Robert's, and KSheps, etc.
- Francine Hardaway
Francine - Hold more posts? Not sure what that means.
- Brian Roy
The "My Discussions" link at the top right is going to save conversations on Friendfeed! (looks like the former "comments and likes" link. Use the "My discussions" link to stay in a conversation.
- Susan Beebe
Francine: my real life happens in real time. The thing is this demands total attention.
- Robert Scoble
Couldn't agree more. You can't sit watching real-time feeds everywhere, all the time.
- Trevor Childs
Robert: That is true but this could really kill productivity so judicious use of the "pause" button or the "close my browser now" button may help at times ...
- Paul Jacobson
I wish we could set meta-level EXCLUDE filters.
- Mike Reynolds
Robert - yep!
- Susan Beebe
I agree 100% great way to follow news but impossible to use without blowing every minute of the day
- Todd Cochrane
Filters organize. They don't help for when you step away from your screen for hours or even a day. RSS readers are superb at this. What you need is a product that can offer you the real-time information while you're present but then allow you to totally pause the flow, mark your spot, and start tracking in an "archive" or "offline" mode, allow you to then catch up in a Google Reader/RSS fashion and then resume real-time activities.
- Kevin Kuphal
What do you think about the new Friendfeed User Interface? Check this Poll: http://is.gd/r1DI
- Yaron Orenstein
Amen, Jeremiah.
- Melanie Reed
What's the point of best of day when shit scrolls by so quickly that new comments get lost and conversations become even more fragmented than before?
- Kevin D. White
I am thinking about using the PowerPress Plug-in for my podcasts. Does anyone have any experience with moving from using the Libsyn tools?
Powerpress Works great and you can gain independence of you podcast check out the free stats that we offer at Blubrry as well.. Todd. Disclosure I am the CEO of the company.
- Todd Cochrane
Watching Tech Bloggers blog on their sites about politics is pretty stupid I have unsubscribed from 5
Eric D. Brown, @baratunde, Ambar Pansari and 10 other people liked this
Agreeeeeeed!
- Joshua Schnell
disagreed. you found their blogs interesting before, but now a few errant posts on one of the most important elections our generation has ever seen has made you decide their content is no longer interesting?
- Jeremy Toeman
I agree it's silly on commercial blogs but yeah, unsubscribing is pretty hardcore.
- Zee.
Tech bloggers talking politics often gets very similar to movie stars talking politics.
- Andrew Leyden
People who DON'T have a political opinion right now scare me.
- Robert Scoble
This election is one of the most important in recent memory for the tech industry overall. If any tech blogger isn't telling you that right now they really aren't a good tech blogger.
- Robert Scoble
I think what he's saying Robert is that he subscribed to tech blogs for tech & not politics.
- Zee.
+1 Robert - well said. That means the either don't have a clue, don't really care, or are too ill informed to really make a decision = EPIC FAIL
- Susan Beebe
I'd have to agree with Zee. If someone subscribes to a blog about bacon do they really care about what politics have to with bacon? Only if it was to outlaw bacon. BTW, I don't like bacon.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
Zee: you can't separate tech from politics. Where did the Internet come from? Politics. Where does broadband policy come from? Politics. Where does Internet regulation come from? Politics. Where does university funding come from? Politics. Anyone who says tech and politics can be separated is uninformed and, worse, just wants to read press releases. Well, sorry, I'm going to tell you what I think. I'm not a press release regurgitator.
- Robert Scoble
Mathew: if you subscribe to me you should expect more than tech. I'm a geek. I'm a blogger. I'm a human. And I have conversations with smart people. I haven't met a smart person lately who hasn't told me what they think about politics.
- Robert Scoble
I see both sides of this. I started a new blog for politics when I realized a large amount of my social media content was being consumed with politics and the election right now as a way to try to find a middle ground.
- Neal Jansons
Perhaps Robert has explained why I have gotten into these conversations and gotten animated about it. I normally just vote and yawn at political talk, and my behavior is confusing me. I'm pretty sure I know more about the candidates than I've ever known about any, and I didn't set out to learn anything.
- MiniMage TKDteacher of FF
Trust me Robert, anything from you I expect more then just the main topic at hand.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
Politics is powerfully enwound with every aspect of technology. Smart people get this.
- Sean McBride
So, basically, Only Politicians are allowed to express their opinions on politics? Movie stars and tech bloggers are not qualified somehow? I would like someone to explain to me how someone's career prevents them from having intelligent opinions about things besides that career. Anyone. Help me out.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
+100
- Allen Stern
Robert, I personally subscribe to you because of who you are and because I love you - not really about tech for me...and you're not really a commercial blog either...so I'm not really speaking about you. But should Louis Gray for example started posting about politics frequently, i'd probably not be immensely pleased. (ps. just chucked in the i love to lighten the mood of the conversation) :)
- Zee.
agreed Mathew. Plus... the internet isn't only american. It's also about knowing your audience. If you're audience is going to your site for personal opinion...then it's a little more feasible to give your political thoughts. If they're going for news/specialized information, then giving your opinion on something outside of that isn't ideal.
- Joshua Schnell
Rah, of course not...but I'm saying and i'm going to put this in capitals so everyone can see...COMMERCIAL TECH BLOGGERS. Bloggers that have advertising on their blog and say they blog about tech.
- Zee.
Hrm, I have ads and I say I blog about tech, but I'm not a commercial tech blogger. I kinda see where you might be going with that, though. I was mostly speaking to Andrew's comment above. Either you like a blogger or you don't. If they go "off topic" about a major historical event and that causes you to unsubscribe, I would assume you were not getting much out of that blog anyway. That was just the straw that broke the camels back.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
Zee: I have advertising on my blog and I say I blog about tech, but, again, tech and politics are intertwined. Or did you forget the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit? Or, did you forget that the candidates come to Silicon Valley to collect our money? Why should we just give the candidates money and not have anything to say?
- Robert Scoble
I'm with Scoble. I use my blog to talk about issues that I believe my readers ought to be paying attention to. Talking about the candidates' positions on issues relating to tech seems worthwhile to me. Odd too that the original appeal of blogs that they were based on personal opinion and a personal voice, and now they are supposed to stay in prescribed channels? Part of the appeal of social media is the possibility of transforming how people interact and learn about issues.
- Tim O'Reilly
I guess if Engadget started talking about politics I'd agree, but I don't see that as a real blog anymore. In my mind a real blog is a single voice of a person and anyone who doesn't have something to say about politics right now scares the heck out of me.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, with all due respect... Scobleizer is about Scoble, not just tech ;)
- Bastard Operator From FF
it depends, is the post about how politics is affecting an issue involving technology, or is the post about a political issue that has nothing to do with technology. The first one I have no problem with , the second I might just stop reading till after 11/4 , no reason to unsubscribe.
- Kim Landwehr
Im with Scoble and tim and Zee here.
- Roberto Bonini
I will give you that politics and tech are somewhat intertwined. But, that does not mean that if I reading a tech blog that I want to constantly see things about the election. As long as its about an event (i.e. The Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit) I'm ok, but if its just someone constantly talking about the election or something like that then its going too far.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
Speaking of which, I just saw Tim O'Reilly post here. His post on Obama is one of the best-thought-out pieces from the tech industry about the choice we have to make this Tuesday.
- Robert Scoble
I have to disagree with your Robert, a blog doesn't have to be just a single person, it can be as many people as you want. Besides, if Engadget didn't have a large group of writers they wouldn't be able to have as much content as they do.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
Politics is so intertwined with everything. There is nothing it doesn't touch. So expect to see it everywhere. Unless you pay for the website service don't complain. This only happens every two years or at the very least every four.
- CW™
Here's Tim O'Reilly's piece: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008... Great piece.
- Robert Scoble
Slashdot posts political info all the time.. I don't see people crying over that.
- CW™
Matthew: well, in Tim's case I've seen 99% tech in the past month and 1% politics. I think my blog is about the same. My FriendFeed, on the other hand, has had a lot more politics because I think it's important.
- Robert Scoble
Imagine Germans in the high tech industry in the 1930s professing to be bored or irritated by politics and political subjects. Meditate on that image.
- Sean McBride
Sean: IBM machines were used to build the databases of the Jews in Germany. You can BET that I would have said something about that, if I was writing in the 1930s. Exactly. Technology and politics are very closely combined. Not to mention that Silicon Valley is a railroad town (you can still see the final spike in our transcontinental railroad in Stanford's museum). Our whole industry got its start because of politics. For any tech blogger to try to distance him/herself from that would be absolutely wrong.
- Robert Scoble
Thats great then. Ands honestly I wouldn't know as I don't read a lot of tech blogs and haven't noticed a problem. But, I just want to get people to see another POV.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
rambn: that's OK. I'm sick of the McCain dividers and name callers. Let's call it even. We weren't in charge the past eight years.
- Robert Scoble
Guys guys, i think is really pretty straight forward. If you're a commercial blogger (your blog is your main source of income) and you say that you blog about startups, webapps and emerging technology. I think it is fair to say that blogging about politics and anything aside from those three things is pretty stupid. If your blog is about **you** because you're a personality of some sort then yes you should be able to post about whatever you want & if people unsubscribe screw 'em.
- Zee.
Everything is Politics, from the way you walk to the tax you pay.
- Angelos Markos
Robert - you picked the perfect example to illustrate my point about Germany's high tech industry in the 1930s. High tech workers who think they can stick their heads in the sand with regard to politics cut quite a figure.
- Sean McBride
Robert - P.S. I definitely don't want to dictate their political views. But I do expect them to be well-informed about political issues, especially those entwined with high tech, and to be able to discuss these issues in an intelligent way.
- Sean McBride
and frankly, as much as I respect Tim O'Reilly - the "Why I Support Barack Obama" stuck out like a sore thumb..as it was from the company blog. Had it been from his own personal one (which i don't believe he has) I wouldn't have been surprised by it.
- Zee.
Sean: yeah, I just visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC a few weeks ago and they had an IBM machine there and explained how it was used to build a database on all Germans. Demonstrates we always need to think about HOW our technology is being used by politicians. Speaking of which, if Obama wins I wonder who'll be the CTO he picks. Ed Felton is the favorite among geeks I talk with.
- Robert Scoble
Zee: if you follow Tim's blog you'll see that is not just an "O'Reilly" blog but is also his personal blog. Oh, and heck, his name is on his company, so maybe they are one and the same? You think?
- Robert Scoble
@Biran Norwood. Maybe have a read of the comments in this particular case before throwing that in?
- Zee.
Naa I don't think Robert. It's the company blog no doubt about it...Yes he blogs on there, yes it says it's his blog...but it's not the same as your blog or any random joe's blog.
- Zee.
rambn: well, when you say you are only sick of one side of the political debate, that sort of marks you as a supporter of the other side. If you were a Ron Paul supporter you would have pointed out you are sick of both sides. If you thought voting doesn't matter you would have said that. So, just what were you trying to say?
- Robert Scoble
I only post about tech stuff, until my latest post about Prop 8 http://alpascual.com/blog...
- al pascual
Zee - my impression is that high tech industry leaders overwhelmingly favor Obama over McCain. They find the culture of the current Republican Party to be alien and hostile to their own. As I recall, Google employees have been making financial contributions to Obama over McCain at a ratio of 24 to 1. Tim O'Reilly is expressing the views of the culture in which he is embedded (and helped...
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- Sean McBride
Zee: well, at the top it says "by Tim O'Reilly" -- and he makes it very clear he's speaking for himself in the piece, not for all his employees. I'm sure there's at least one or two McCain supporters there (my producer, for instance, is a McCain supporter so when i blog it's pretty clear I'm not blogging HIS opinion to you).
- Robert Scoble
Interesting discussion. This is one of the reasons I'm glad I didn't pigeonhole my blog as a "writing" blog or an "author" blog (and I stay away from tech - that gets 8 hours of my workday already). I'm not much of a "personality" yet (I do HAVE one, I think), but it's a better fit for the mish-mash of thoughts I care to share on my blog. I'd hate to be...limited to one topic, and I can barely keep up with one blog - I don't want ten to express all the different facets of me.
- Holly Jahangiri
Also, I wouldn't unsubscribe; I'd comment to the author. If they kept writing about topics that turned me off or seemed inappropriate to the audience at large, THEN I'd unsubscribe.
- Holly Jahangiri
Oh, i'm not discussing who he supports here...that's nothing to do with it. It was just the fact that it was a political post. I think we can agree that O'Reilly is named after Tim O'Reilly but it is very much a tech media company now and he blogs on their company blog as Tim O'Reilly. It's not his blog the same way scobleizer.com's is yours. If Arrington wrote a post about why he supported McObama (whoever) then i'm certain there would be an uproar on techcrunch...personal blog would be a different story.
- Zee.
I think the point being missed here is that if you have the attention of a slew of people, you can (or believe you can) do and say damn well anything you want. 'Smaller' bloggers may well sacrifice nontrivial loss of subscribers if their niche and focus is diverted.
- abacab
My problem is with people like Dave Winer who I have followed for years despite his shrill Berkley political rantings. Yet the moment I made a single comment on one post (simply pointing out the author of an article he linked was incorrect) he made here on FF, he blocked me. So despite whatever insight he may have on Tech, which I value, the politics has greatly soured the experience.
- John Rubier
Zee: I disagree with that. Tim's writings has always been personal and about what he cares about. Generally that's more on geeky smart people side of things, but I didn't mind it one bit because it was clear it was his thinking and it came with his byline on it. I didn't view that any differently than other executives speaking out on politics over the years (usually they support Republicans because of the tax advantages, but this year almost all of them have switched to the Democratic side of the ticket).
- Robert Scoble
I respect and listen to tech experts who are experts on tech all year round. If you're all of a sudden going to become a political pundit, sorry, that respect doesn't just funnel over.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
John: that's just Dave. He stopped calling me (we talked almost every day for years) because I interviewed someone he didn't like and supported him. Personally I've blocked a few people this year for taking idiotic stances too. My entire life now is focused on having conversations with smart people, like we are having here. Sometimes people demonstrate they aren't smart and we get enough of that on Fox. No need to listen more here if they aren't willing to have a conversation. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Shey: I never said you had to respect their opinions. But politics is part of the tech industry and it is important to cover. If you disagree with someone's opinions, seems to me you should state the case for what you believe. If your ideas are better, they will win in the marketplace.
- Robert Scoble
It can't be said too often: fair, free and open debate is the heart and soul of functioning and healthy democratic societies. Let the best ideas win in the free marketplace of ideas.
- Sean McBride
@Brian It's pathetic how a comment like "Maybe have a read of the comments in this particular case before throwing that in?" causes you to react like a little girl.
- Zee.
It's about leadership - an industry commentator like scoble or oreilly needs to share their experience. If I want tech press releases, I'll subscribe to tech press releases. If I want to hear from a person, then I'll follow a person. I reserve the right to unsubscribe from the rabidly obsessed - whether talking about Microsoft or Palin, but that reflects a person that is not the enquiring commentator I want.
- Alistair Nicholson
I specialise in Government IT. Policy affects schools - do you want your country competitive in 5, 8, 20 years? That is being determined right now. Policy affects research - will you have patents to underpin your industry? IP rights and downloading issues affect almost everything - vibrant industry or patent/music portfolio holders. So .. from your real people leaders do you want sugar-coated bits of news while the big issues of the day are ignored? Then don't subscribe to people who care - try Fox.
- Alistair Nicholson
Oh .. and for the Bacon manufacturer comment. Do you think there are many large meat processing firms left that DON'T track politics (mostly local) - PETA, waste discharge, effluent, water charges, rates, payroll tax. The worker on the floor doesn't think about it, just as a sysadmin might not. If you want to play a higher role or loyalty to your industry - it matters. Up to you.
- Alistair Nicholson
not a clue what Midol is Brian, but whatever the case - I hope you find time to grow up & review your original reply with regret one day soon because it is, without any doubt, pathetic. Blocked, au revoir.
- Zee.
well, take this in context. Todd is quite conservative and I'm sure the bloggers he unsubbed from are not. I'd have a hard time with it, as myself, if I was surrounded by conservaties - so I can understand that perspective. fwiw, as conservatives go, Todd's also a pretty nice guy.
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
The way this campaign has shaken out a lot of people are saying some very outlandish things. It is one thing to have a dialogue and agree to disagree.But I have heard some pretty Vile and Outlandish things come out of people I once thought were pretty level headed. It is as if people have simply lost their minds. If you treat your blog as a business then the last thing you want to do is piss off 50% of your readership which ever side of the fence your on.
- Todd Cochrane
FWIW the original tweet was not pointed at Scoble as he has always covered a wide gambit of issues and I may agree to disagree on some issues he puts out but the commentary has been rational . The original tweet was directed at some blogs that I have been reading that have been commercially tech for a long time who have become pretty political these past few months posting commentary that was beyond inflammatory.
- Todd Cochrane
Good God Todd Get over it already, when the "shit SO HITS THE FAN" as it has in the last eight years anyone not interested in political correction from the complete and utter failure of an admin to "DO RIGHT" I thought O'Reilly's piece was clear, succinct, I appreciated it. I think it is admirable.
- Chris Darling
My perspective is a lot different, you have to remember I am both a Iraq and Afghanistan vet now retired. I am not doom and gloom about the economy my company (no longer startup) is in the black having had an amazing fiscal year with no slow down in site. We don't have venture guys to worry about shutting us down as we are well into the black and can survive a long time if income stopped today. We don't need a government handout and we really don't want to pay another 7-11% in taxes each year.
- Todd Cochrane
The problem is that injecting your politics into a non political setting is, quite frankly, kinda rude and off putting. I unsubscribed to a show I loved in the past because the hosts just couldn't resist validating each others political views on many shows (this was 2 years ago BTW). Currently I will remove friends from Twitter who can't seem to resist telling me when their candidate of choice farts.
- Mike James
I know what you mean... At first, I felt uneasy about tech people talking politics. Namely Gruber freaked me out. But seeing the well tempered Tim O'Reilly coming out of the closet changed my mind. Saying I belong to "Group A and not Group B" is showing profile. Of course, by now we know: stating your political opinion as a techie is not such a risky move -- unless you're a Republican techie: Tech people are 99% liberal. Why? You can be progressive and conservative at the same time.
- Oliver Reichenstein
Todd, considering your political tweets last week, I wonder if you unsubbed because they got political or because you disagreed. Regardless, I'll take your advice.
- Nerraux
Tweeting on my personal tweet account is one thing. I have no issues putting political views on my personal blog in fact I have in the past but I don't post political commentary on my tech site or in my podcast
- Todd Cochrane
Gov. Computer News cited critical vulnerability in Firefox 3. Mozilla is working on it - http://www.gcn.com/online...
Dimitar Vesselinov liked this
Always something that's for sure!
- Todd Cochrane
If you are into socialization online, then try using Flock. It is a Firefox based browser with added programs that makes socializing online a lot easier. Flock can use most Firefox addons.
- Brandon
Lunch at Aloha Tower after great podcamphawaii mtg - http://brightkite.com/objects...
 |
Wish I could have been there lunch times dont work though
- Todd Cochrane
I'm doing an analysis on all the new 'social media' agencies...any comments, recommendations, names,..etc - coming out next week
Have a chat with Ted Shelton at the Conversation Group...
- David Sifry
as a newbie - can U tell me what is a SM agency?
- R. Ferguson
Dave: i've chatted with Ted already - they are scopping up alot of podtech social media people and service some of our accounts... I know of them. They are precisely the reason why I'm writing the blog post because a new model in agencies have arrived...
- John Furrier
John not sure if we are considered a social media agency but we do do social media deals as you know.
- Todd Cochrane
I'd love to see your findings
- Jeremiah Owyang
Looking forward to your analysis.
- Vic Podcaster
Contact Paull Young at Converseon, I am sure he will have some great insights.
- Bert DuMars
@loiclemeur We are planning a #Podcamp + Wordcamp Hawaii Oct 24-25th, can you make it? http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event...
Roxanne is a Wordcamp a wordpress thing? Not a wordpress user nor will i ever be.. Be there to support the podcamp portion though
- Todd Cochrane
Wordcamp = wordpress users thing; we'll be having WP & other blog platform sessions at podcamphawaii
- Roxanne Darling
Back in Honolulu, beautiful day here!
You got out of ORD just in time; we are STILL in Chicago and won't get home til 5 pm Monday.
- Roxanne Darling
Ohh boy the weather was looking crappy, that really sucks
- Todd Cochrane
cspenn: Two VERY interesting people will be attending PodCamp Ohio. Wish it wasn't so damn expensive to fly there from Boston.
who?? I'm here
- Todd Cochrane
Welcome Geek News Central Listeners let follow one another to stay on top of events in the space.
Hello Todd, I think this could become very useful.
- Jim Williams
I agree it should allow the audience to really Jell
- Todd Cochrane
Hey Todd, another great place for the Ohana to participate in the Geek News Central podcast happenings.
- Sam Garcia
I am in. Looking forward to seeing how all this works out. I am using it for other collaborations and have already seen it payoff.
- Paul Barton
from twhirl
Wow. how do you keep up with all the info and place to find it. I have created a folder in firefox called geeknews that opens just all the stuff from gnc
- Mike Abair
This is great!
- raincloudcat
About 50% of the White Label Social Networking industry submitted for my upcoming report http://www.web-strategist.com/blog...
John Cass liked this
Well its to bad we did not hear about this earlier, being the only company selling a white label new media social networking solution it would have been nice to have been able to submit our information. Todd from RawVoice
- Todd Cochrane
Todd I responded to you in the comments, please go read.
- Jeremiah Owyang
Yahoo The Failure: Myth Versus Reality - http://searchengineland.com/080620-...
Amit Patel, david robinson, Susan Beebe and 20 other people liked this
Good article from Danny Sullivan about Yahoo. I've been following Danny for 10 years now, ever since the AltaVista and GoTo.com days, and think this is one of his best posts ever.
- Mike Reynolds
from Bookmarklet
Personally I could care less what happens to Yahoo they have been a non player for me for years. The only thing I use that they own is Flickr and even that I dont use that much.
- Todd Cochrane
Yes, yes, yes! Thank goodness there is some sanity in the "rooting-for-yahoo-to-sink-like-the-titanic-and-gawk-through-binoculars" noise. Yahoo screwed up, that's for sure. But they've got mail, finance, sports (fantasy), del.icio.us, flckr, and huge home page traffic. Some new management and leadership (may not be who is there currently) might help bring new life and new talent to an under performing property.
- AJ Kohn
I feel bad. I've been critical for years, but they own two of the best web properties (flickr and del.icio.us), have some great developer tools, are big Hadoop users, etc etc. But they did it to themselves (or at least the people up top did it to them).
- Deepak Singh
The reason why there's so much noise from people wanting Yahoo to fail comes down to this: Yahoo isn't used by social media geeks. It's used by millions of ordinary people, and that means it's to be sneered at. I remember the same internet snobbery in the 1990's about AOL - the digerati (as they styled themselves then) HATED AOL, because ordinary people found it fun and useful.
- Ian Betteridge
Mike - right there with you on both counts on this one (10 years plus and great piece). Many of the 'departees' will find their comfort zone was outright wrong and discover a new life.
- Charlie Anzman
I care about Yahoo because they are the icon of web 1.0 - granted they didn't do anything innovative other then provide the average user a portal. Innovation just doesn't seem to be Yahoo's gig. Too bad. I wouldn't write them off yet. It only takes 1-2 killer products and they can swarm right back to the top.
- John Furrier
I am a fan of Yahoo and the SEL article really puts into perspective what #2 means and why Yahoo is still a contender, yes there are things that need to be addressed, and maybe with the change in leadership, we will see that happens. Love the advice on the homepage crap, and I almost agree completely with Danny Sullivan's management suggestions. I am excited that Yahoo will be going through some very big changes, but I am apprehensive....we will see what happenes.
- Aunesty Janssen
from twhirl
John - you wouldn't call Pipes innovative? wow...tough crowd! I kinda wanted to hate them, and they do have a track record of running things into the ground, but Flickr and del.icio.us remain pretty great, IMO, and Upcoming.org isn't all that bad, once your run it through feedburner's eventflare. Pipes could be a game-changer if more than a few people understood what it can do.
- Mr. Gunn
Trying to figure out how a reddit clone would make Blubrry.com better
People could "digg" episodes so something that is really good or whatever could be better noticed.
- Mike Wills
We have the juice it feature already, but need to think about blubrry integration only
- Todd Cochrane
Bandwidth Caps used to Force more TV Watching! - http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archive...
Sarah Perez, raincloudcat, Jake (aka Jawee) and Robert Scoble liked this
do you think that if all the major isp's put caps on their services...new services will come out that progress the internet? in other words..is it possible that the internet will grow because more people will be motivated to find a way around the caps?
- raincloudcat
The question is how. I live in a area that is serviced by a Monopoly others will have more options. But when you have a single company as the sole source broadband provider in the area their bw cap consideration is concerning
- Todd Cochrane
cocomment Announces Support for Seesmic Video Comments - http://www.loiclemeur.com/english...
paul mooney liked this
when are we gonna get support for Movable Type?
- Todd Cochrane
Todd, we are almost ready.
- Loic Le Meur
Qik Strikes Back: Supporting iPhone Next Week - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r...
Tyler Gillies, Roger Benningfield, Lynne d Johnson and 16 other people liked this
This is good news
- Bwana ☠
Inevitable. We'll see if YouTube ups the ante.
- l0ckergn0me
Awesome!
- Beau Liening
Very cool, I was hoping they'd come out with one. Hard to believe the quality will be anything but choppy though.
- Leif Hansen
Now just for Blackberry support....
- Aaron Myers
The iPhone can't RECORD video, so play only. A ScobblePhone it is not.
- TranceMist
@TranceMist -The iphone can record video, if its jailbroken. And I'm sure a slew of video apps (much better thanthe choppy current ones) will be out on the 11th.
- Leif Hansen
@TranceMist: Using the iPhone Video Recorder for jailbroken iPhones, I can shoot and upload vids directly to YouTube. It is not streaming and not great quality, but it records video and audio.
- Liana Lehua
What annoys me is they've only come out with this now because Fixwagon beat them to it.
- Duncan Riley
Yeah exactly Duncan, this was pretty pathetic IMHO.
- MG Siegler
What bothers me is how short their demo was. It almost seemed like it wasn''t functional since they cut it so fast
- Bwana ☠
Heh hopefully this doesn't make for more qik spam on twitter, though I have moved more to plurk now
- BCK
I wish QIK would integrate with Windows Mobile sometime soon. I have been dying to use there service.
- Mike Fruchter
The question one needs to ask will the application run on phones that have not been jailbroke
- Todd Cochrane
from twhirl
Duncan if you think Qik started working on this yesterday I have a cool bridge in SF that I would like to sell you. Qik showed off Windows Mobile last week.
- Robert Scoble
can't wait
- mjc
from Alert Thingy
looking forward to it - very much so
- Alexander Falk
from twhirl
Robert did they mention when it would be available to win mobile users?
- Mike Fruchter
A couple of weeks.
- Robert Scoble
how about blackberry? :)
- clarke thomas
No
- hiuihi
New Advertiser, AIM call-out. I checked with my brother in FL who calls New Zealand a lot. Mostly, though, they use Skype - http://call-out.aim.com/...
How is it working out?
- Todd Cochrane
"All your base are belong to us" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
re: today's Podcast: Hey Todd, had to smirk when I heard you say that "all your video are belong to us" was grammatically wrong. Yes it is wrong, ...but... actually, whenever you hear something that includes "are belong to us" it's probably "gamer-humor", making fun of bad translations in the (very old) game named "Zero Wing" where one sentence was translated from Japanese to English as "all your base are belong to us". I linked to the wiki that explains a little of the phenomenon :)
- saskia
Yepp makes sense
- Todd Cochrane
Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r...
Ellen Moore, Torsten Eckert, Voyagerfan5761 and 30 other people liked this
This is total bullshit. Why do I have 11,556 subscribers on FriendFeed, I'm FAR FAR FAR FAR more active on FriendFeed, and yet FriendFeed never has gone down on me? Also, Twitter went down at its first SXSW before I had a ton of followers there. Twitter has major problems, they still don't have a good engineering answer, and so they are blaming their most popular users. Great. We get the message. We'll go someplace where there's a good engineering team. You know, the guys who invented Gmail and Google Maps? They are the ones behind FriendFeed. See ya Twitter!
- Robert Scoble
Did you even read the dev post on Twitter by Alex Payne? He said that they have major architectural hurdles to get over. The reason FriendFeed works so much better than Twitter is because it was built from the beginning to do so. Twitter needs to rebuild after having already built an amazing and large community. I just don't get the venom and hate. :(
- Nathaniel Payne
And again, Robert: Twitter didn't say one word about you. If they have, show me where. You're reading someone's headline, getting angry, and making a technical statement into something personal.
- Ian Betteridge
Robert, you are to blame. If you did not hype twitter originally, then maybe we wouldn't have been there. Then you couldn't start conversations that people talked about on twitter. In reality, the "power user" problem talks more to their issues with the back end than anything else.
- Rob Diana
Ian: they don't need to name me. I'm one of the most noisy users on Twitter and have one of the largest following and follower bases. They were talking very specifically about me and Venture Beat decided to have some fun. The whole thing is bull. They got $15 million in venture. The time for blame is long gone. They need to fix their problems.
- Robert Scoble
@Ian Actually it was an indirect mention -- this is the quote from Twitter dev. Alex Payne: "The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side."
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
Go Robert!
- Mitchell Tsai
Robert: Yes, I know, I posted that for you below :) And that doesn't say they're blaming the users. It's saying "This is what happens". Read the comment in context (http://dev.twitter.com/2008...) and it's clear they're NOT blaming users for their architectural weaknesses. They describe it, openly, as "a square peg in a round hole". That's not blaming the users, is it?
- Ian Betteridge
But to be fair, yes, Twitter has also acknowledged the fact that it was never built to get this big (from scratch)
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
Sprague, they are doing everything they can to take the focus off their own mistakes. They are clearly clueless to what's going on. If they weren't clueless, these problems would have been fixed months ago. Even if this isn't a direct snipe at Scoble, it's pointing the finger at their own community, which includes you, me and most of the people reading this. And it's not right.
- Andrew Dobrow
Sprague: they should just fix their damn problems and stop blaming anyone. I would never never have blamed anyone for my problems. FastCompany is seeing scaling issues. We're not blaming our users, we're rebuilding our database servers, putting them on new hosting, etc, etc until we fix the problem. And if there's a problem we can't fix, we won't blame one set of users. We'll say "we didn't plan properly, or design properly, and we are seeing loads that are much higher than we can deal with, so wht we doing
- Robert Scoble
From Dev/Twitter: "Twitter started as a one-day project to explore sharing status via SMS that rapidly took on a life of its own. That Twitter would eventually evolve into a messaging system in its own right wasn't conceptualized from the get-go." - "We interview constantly and have a talented recruiter bringing us exceptional candidates daily...We're currently exploring supplementing...
more...
- Mitchell Tsai
Shey: >>Twitter has also acknowledged the fact that it was never built to get this big (from scratch) >> I did a video interview at Twitter about a year ago and heard that excuse back then. OK, that made sense back then, but now? It just doesn't ring true anymore.
- Robert Scoble
Translation of Dev/Twitter: (1) We never had a scalable design. (2) We don't have the people that understand scalable design, and we're trying to find reliable consultants (too many fly-by-nights out there). --- I think they need to hire some people from Google Research, Microsoft Research, Research universities, or industry-types who've done big transactional systems (billions-trillions of transactions)....ahem...new CTO. Not just a VP Engineering type.
- Mitchell Tsai
Too funny.
- Andrew Baron
Andrew, read this: http://dev.twitter.com/2008.... Now tell me - is that or is it not a public admission of what's wrong with their architecture?
- Ian Betteridge
The Google guys are too busy working on improving FriendFeed, I doubt they want to get involved in this Twitter trouble.
- Andrew Dobrow
someone some time ago suggested if twitter asks 1000 developers to come and give a hand they'd be happy to do so, maybe even for free, I also think they're clueless, but I don't see them asking for help
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
Dobromir: "Not asking for help" is a big difference between "A-people" and "B-people" in VC-speak. "B-people" are afraid to ask people better/smarter than them to help, usually because they fear a lack of control. It's not usually because they think they're better. They often fear the "help of others".
- Mitchell Tsai
@Robert I totally agree. They should have known the system wasn't scalable then and shouldn't be surprised with what's happening now.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
Ian, I know all about the post. I was advocating Twitter communication for the last few weeks before they just started communicating recently. Here is a quote from that post "we're more scalable than we were a year ago, but we're not yet reliably horizontally scalable" How can they say they're more scalable then they were a year ago? Other than that, that post served as a "were listening" message and a "yeah we have problems" post, yet they still divert to it not being as bad as "last year" which is crap!
- Andrew Dobrow
Scoble: Dobromir has a good point. It's why VCs usually bet on the "team". It's tough to work with a Twitter-like group. Eventually Twitter can probably learn to build a better system, but will they? And will anyone still be using them then?
- Mitchell Tsai
@Mitchell probably right, but isn't Twitter already out of control, people used to get back after a tough night I don't think that's the case anymore, the momentum is long gone
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
I'm with Ian so much so I joined FF just to comment. I can see how it is possible to spin that post into "Scoble is killing Twitter" but I just don't see it that way. The post is explaining the issue, not atributing blame to an individual user or the community.
- Michael Sadler
Andrew, they can easily be more scalable than a year ago: however, their growth may have outpaced their ability to replace parts of their architecture with better, more scalable systems. They could have found themselves in a "whack-a-mole" scenario: you fix one thing, which increases load on another, which then breaks. So you fix that, and it increases load elsewhere... etc. But either way, I don't think they're blaming the users, which is what's being claimed here.
- Ian Betteridge
Sprague: BING BING BING BING. Twitter's team never has been very communicative on Twitter. FriendFeed's team is TONS better.
- Robert Scoble
Ian, using that argument still doesn't make them more scalable at all. Being scalable calls for the proof that a site is ready for growth. They have proven that they are not ready for that at all. If Twitter had just made a reference to user cache's being backed-up, that would be understandable. But they made a specific allusion to "popular" users with "thousands" of followers who make rapid successive posts.
- Andrew Dobrow
On another tangent, who says they can't blame the community - we don't own (i.e pay) for the service - we are just consumers. True, it might rub people up the wrong way, but it's their party and they can do what they want. Just like we can choose to use FF if Twitter is always going down, right?
- Michael Sadler
Ian: Whack-a-mole is usually a symptom of incorrect architectures at the base of the system...
- Mitchell Tsai
Michael, do you forget that without a community there is nowTwitter? We are all they have. In effect, we do run Twitter. We have more control than they do at the moment now that we know that Scoble could launch a rapid attack and bring the whole boat down to the ground.
- Andrew Dobrow
Robert I don't understand your anger here. You just said on Twitter, while pointing to this article, "Twitter blames me [....] Screw you, Twitter". Twitter did not blame you - and even taking the stance that it was indirect, as you mention above, is still not blaming you. The article points to the fact that popular users cause their database to take big hits and that "It basically has to take its first architecture, which isn’t working, and re-build it on the fly while the service is still running.".
- Scott O'Raw
Sprague: You've got it! When I'm building a company, I try to wait hands-and-foot on my big customers/users. If anything, it's the little guy who suffers if I'm strapped for time. Going after Scoble is STUPID business sense. Better would be "Scoble...would you like to join our improvement group? We'd really value your input (& pay you) comparing different systems because you've used so many. We'd like to know which systems have the best scalable architectures & what technologies they use."
- Mitchell Tsai
...continuing from above: This, to me, points to Twitter realising that the architecture they built was insufficient to cope with how popular Twitter became. If anything it highlights the super-user as a symptom, not the cause. Perhaps though, all this is just a return to the linkbaiting Scoble of old? Incidentally, I had to split this comment into 2 as FF imposes a limit on the 'conversation' - hmmmm :S
- Scott O'Raw
It's obvious Venturebeat wanted tons of traffic by naming Scoble even though the Twitter team did their best to explain what was happening without blaming anyone. In fact, if anything, they blame their own design. Good job MG Siegler, and Venturebeat. Aa cheap shot, but I'm sure it did what you wanted it to do
- Alexander van Elsas
Andrew, I'm not saying that Twitter is scalable (and Mitchell is totally right about whack-a-mole). What I'm saying is that nothing they've said blames the users. It just describes the problems.
- Ian Betteridge
I'm with Scoble that statement was a very poor choice. I don't get all of these "to be fair Twitter wasn't supposed to be this big" arguments. If Twitter was built to be a smaller service to begin with then they should have never let Scoble or anyone else follow and be followed by so many people - poor planning, poor execution and now to top it all off they are going to s**t on the very people who have been enthusiastically championing their service? Wrong choice.
- Marco(aureliusmaximus)
Twitter does not know what they are doing, and when they need a scape goat they have Scoble. Stop blaming the users, Twitter. Find a solution instead.
- Baard @ Pixum
But the user should never have been put in the position to have control over whether the service is up or down. That's ridiculous. It's like a Wiki of stability.
- Andrew Dobrow
Love the photo of Scoble on that article. :)
- TranceMist
Andrew, yes, users should be able to do whatever the system lets them do. But what they seem to be saying is "Twitter wasn't really designed to do this. We need to fix it."
- Ian Betteridge
I don't think Twitter was trying to blame Scoble. People were asking what they could do to help it was a problem they had to eventually resolve. Stop taking things out of contex and blowing them up. :-\
- Damon Cortesi
from twhirl
Ian --the problem is that (and Scoble has pointed this out) they have had plenty of time to anticipate and fix this problem and seemingly ignored it. Now with a forced last ditch effort at "transparency" they are discussing it and hoping to buy time. I think their time has past. I am with Scoble (maybe not as angry as he is at this point though). They should just pack up their tent, give the $15 mill back and move on. The problems are too deep. Their general incompetence is too visible.
- Brian Sullivan
any service hoping to grow needs to plan for scale at the outset, basic web architectural issue (whether 1.0 or 2.0 or beyond) - blaming outside services & their own users is the sign of a dying entity unfortunately - but remember the value of twitter is in the community it contains, which just needs to migrate away to something richer and more stable - ff seems like a nice place to land :)
- mike "glemak" dunn
Andrew: Yep, I understand the community makes Twitter - without people like Scoble, Calacanis et al I wouldn't bother visiting Twitter. The point I'm making is that it's their choice - we haven't paid for the right to depend on certain levels of uptime and we don't have a right to demand it. All we can do is expect it, and if Twitter's service doesn't meet our expectations (because they don't have the infrastructure, architecture, skills or simply can't be bothered then we can go somewhere else.
- Michael Sadler
Some meta-pointers for this discussion & my opinions here http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Mitchell Tsai
You could also say, "Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo are killing Twitter". I'm reminded of one of Jeff Atwoods posts that said "All bugs are your fault, no matter what is causing them." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog...
- Scott Koon
I agree with Scoble. Instead of blaming ANY user, be it specifically or in general, they should apologize, maybe throw a bone to the power users who make it popular, and get their shit together. Once they have a stable architecture and service, they could take the next step and figure out a way to make money. What they are doing now is akin to a brick and mortar retailer telling hordes of customers to go away because the weight is cracking the foundation.
- JR Huestis
Jesus, there is just no love here. Let's put aside the scalability issue for one moment. ROBERT: TWITTER DID NOT BLAME YOU. Why take this so personally and unleash a shitstorm? Just because you're not happy with their perceived lack of responsiveness? They built an app, probably for fun. it took off. You used them, you liked them, you promoted them. They're trying to catch up. Probably trying like hell. Everyone is so damned ready to do a pile-on - what's that say about us? Chill out everyone.
- Eric Weaver
Scoble is too popular for twitter. : )
- Alex Soto
Even if power users like Scoble are part of the problem, you dont blame them, you figure out how to solve it, Its an incredibly dumb move to blame anything except themselves, never mind the people who make it popular.
- Scott Purdie
Twitter didn't blame anyone. I don't see how on earth you could infer that from that post on the twitter blog.
- Clint Ecker
Twitter needs to be left to die while people move onto something better. If my gmail account was regularly down (regardless of whether it's because of poor planning or because of people like Scoble) then I'd move on, get a new email address somewhere else and call it a day. In my eyes an email address is something that should be more long term and solid than whether you use twitter, jaiku or pownce. Seems it should be an easy switch??
- Bob
from Alert Thingy
Cmon guys READ THE POSTS. VENTURE BEAT introduced the blame on Scoble, just traffic and link bait, and looking at this discussion they did a GREAT job on it. Just a cheap shot, nothing more. If anything this shows that Friendfeed is not only used for good in-depth discussions but it is also a forum for anyone that wants to add an opinion, even if it is totally besides reality.
- Alexander van Elsas
This is the way I see it guys. Whenever I see the term "Heavy Twitter user" or "Twitter power user", Robert Scoble's smiling face and creepy laugh appears. Robert is THE Twitter power user. So whether Venture Beat mentioned Scoble or not, he would be part of that list of users Twitter mentioned. As a matter of fact he would be at the top of the list. http://www.twitterholic.com/twitter... He performs the most updates out of the top Twitter users which is what they complained about.
- Bwana ☠
Rule #1 of business survival. Don't piss off Scoble. He has too many people that listen to him, because he knows what he is talking about. Bret Taylor and team are amazing. With only 8 employees (last time I heard recently) and less than a year old, they are outperforming Twitter (not that hard right now) and perhaps even Facebook. I like the expression that "money flows to where it is well treated". The same is true with customers.
- Alex Hammer
Friendfeed needs a LIKE click for comments -- I would like to LIKE Scoble's first comment in this thread.
- Sean McBride
They never expressed blame-- they expressed that the majority of the strain was due to tweeting of users with lots of followers... It's a statement of architectural failure on their part. To make the fantastic leap that somehow that means they're saying it's power users' FAULT seems bizarre. Somewhere a VentureBeat editor is cackling with glee that you rose to the bait.
- Tony Wright
It is simply shocking that they would blame there power users. If you cannot build a system to scale they should have limited how many people you can follow ridiculous
- Todd Cochrane
twitter has not only shown their ineptitude with IT management they've now gone a step further and shown their ineptitude with Customer Service appreciation! wow... ultra lame and low brow tactics...not the way to treat your community of early adopters who helped build the fame and fun around your product. what dopes!
- Susan Beebe
maybe this is twitter's new strategy - dump the heavy cargo (aka popular users like Scoble) out of the sinking twitter ship and then get more water out...keep trying to plug up holes with bubble gum!
- Susan Beebe
The VC guys should have given the 15 mil to me
- Charlie Anzman
Go to Jaiku!
- Andrew Ruess
Robert, its becoming more and more apparent that the management at twitter has no clue how to control a service, and instead of admitting they need help, they continue to give run-arounds and hope people blindly follow. No good company should ever blame their problems on the users. plain and simple
- BCK
Come on Robert, 12,318 tweets couldn't get it down, could it? I have almost done 12K and I know many Dutchies who are over 20K @erwblo is way over 25K. So, who did it then? ;-) (Lets get into consipracies here...)
- Arne Hulstein
http://xrl.us/bmazc tweets totally f#(%ed twitter
- Noah David Simon
Come ON already, it's PR. You know how you change the word 'problem' to 'opportunity' or 'challenge'? Yeah, they blamed users, but did so in that retarded passive aggressive 'say the opposite' way. Just like the more they say 'open and transparent' the more I think it's full of shit. It's not fooling anyone anymore.
- Eric Rice
That was an awesome lunar landing.
Ditto
- Todd Cochrane
Should have included this in my last tweet: Link to Ustream Live Mars Landing coverage http://www.ustream.tv/channel...
Its on NASA TV as well minus the clowns in chat
- Todd Cochrane
I used gasbuddy.com to find $4 gas near my commute, but I didn't have time to get by there. Todd, I bet you've received tons of pictures by now.
Mike Abair liked this
About 80 ;)
- Todd Cochrane
I am pretty new to twitter so this is something I heard about new on your podcast. Which do you prefer
I use both, they are unique Twitter is for quick shout outs, FriendFeed is for having threaded discussion others can follow. Content tends to be short lived stuff happening today.
- Todd Cochrane
Listening to the show and the gas station acroos the street is 40 per gallon. But I cant findmdy camera. EGADS
The question is will you wish it was still $4.00 a year from now when it say $8.00
- Todd Cochrane
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