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

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

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 our team with consultants, and we've accepted strategic help from outside organizations who actually do have armies of geniuses. - 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

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

this is all due to the 'PUSH' architecture which Twitter was built on, for an SMS service. Friendfeed is all PUBLISH (by you) then PULL (by your feed followers) just like a web site. - kosso via twhirl

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 Overgaard Hansen

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 via 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 via 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 - NoahDavidSimon

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