Dear Ev,

Frankly I’m baffled.  As I type this, Twitter is throwing a 503 error back to twitterific and is showing the newly idiotic "Something is technically wrong" web page at the home URL.  This is the morning after yet another period of system maintenance or upgrades.

Your goodwill is rapidly deteriorating.  The service is notoriously unstable, and in fact just yesterday I saw someone begin advocating against depending upon Twitter for emergency communication.  Why?  Too undependable.  This is quite a turn-around from the period during & after the San Diego fires, where Twitter was embraced by fire dept folks for use in just this type of situation.

It would be easy to say "You get what you pay for" – neither I, nor any user, pay to use Twitter.  And you’d be right.  But you’re trying to make this a business, and so I respectfully suggest that you begin running the operation as though *everyone* is paying.  Bring in some experts.  Redesign – from the ground up if necessary.

Once folks develop a habit of use, they begin to feel entitled.  They show up, you provide a workable twitter service, and somewhere along the way you figure out how to monetize.  That’s the value exchange.  But when they show up and all they encounter is a timeout (there’s the 503 again just now in twitterific) or a condescending error page, they feel cheated.  People are funny that way. 

And they will leave.  As I’ve said before, I really like Twitter.  But the value exchange is currently askew.

(oh, and there’s that 503 again… three times while I was posting.  )

Tags: twitter

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Twitter – I like you.  Really.  But enough with the completely unstable platform already, ok?  You have the money and buzz to get whatever is necessary to stabilize your service.  Simply creating a new "Service is down" page ain’t cutting it.

Someone else will figure out how to replace you if you don’t get this right very soon.  Are you really off-line, like the 404 message indicates?  Or is your load balancing solution giving up the ghost?

Whatever the issues, they’ve been going on for so long that you’re now on the receiving end of the dreaded Open Letter to Twitter.   I want you guys to succeed, so please get your shit together.

Tags: twitter

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This is the second time I’ve encountered a 502 error while attempting to connect to my mail account. 

This is not a very encouraging sign, as I’ve used the service for only about four months. 

Google has hundreds (maybe thousands) of servers assigned to GMail.  What actually happens in these cases?  Is a commodity server box failing while it is still in rotation?

I’d like to see a better explanation than a mildly fancified 502 page.

Tags: gmail, error, 502

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I’m really beginning to wonder about Leopard.  In all the time I had Tiger – on both a G4 Powerbook as well as on this Macbook Pro – not a single kernel panic, ever.

Just had my first one this morning on Leopard.  It looks like the Airport driver crashed hard.  Something else that is interesting -  Leopard apparently still uses the Darwin kernel.  I didn’t know that:

Tags: apple, leopard, osx, mac

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If you are using a Mac running a recent version of OSX, the answer is No.  In fact this is super easy and is available from inside Microsoft Word.   If you run Windows, this feature isn’t available without an additional plugin from a third-party.

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Wow. My gut told me it was a lot, but this study provides an irrefutable quantity:

935

Here’s the CNN report about the project:

CNN Report

And here’s the project itself, complete with a searchable database. Amazing stuff. Thank you to everyone involved.

Public Integrity Org

This is incredibly disturbing, but sadly unsurprising. At what point does “…publicly made false statements” turn into “lied” ? This damage will take years, and quite possibly decades, to repair. I hope that both my kids and I (and Jen) live to see our country once again behaving as though we want the rest of the world to behave.

There’s hope. It begins in January 2009.

Tags: bush, iraq

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We recently purchased a Nordictrack elliptical trainer.  The machine is pretty nice, but both my wife and I immediately noticed a major annoyance: there wasn’t any documentation about how many “miles” the elliptical travels over the course of a workout.  We’re both accustomed to that form of measurement; the number of revolutions per workout was essentially meaningless.

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I IM’ed a friend yesterday to let him know I no longer used facebook.  He asked why, and I told him I no longer trusted facebook.  The truth is – I never really trusted them; it simply took a while for that to sink in and for me to take action.  I wiped as much as I could from my account & deactivated it – not surprisingly, you cannot delete your account. 

Trust is the single most important factor of any of my online activities.  Simple utility isn’t the differentiation any more, as there are many choices today for even arcane services.

I simply don’t trust facebook at this point. Beacon was designed as a social-spying program, etc… and Zuckerberg himself seems like the type of person ¹ I wouldn’t trust if he lived across the street. I’ve read a lot about him & the litigation around the formation of facebook, and one quote that stands out is "Just how many enemies he has collected at such a young age.”²

I think 2008 will be a watershed year for facebook in ways that the company isn’t expecting.  I can afford to be wrong – they can’t.

¹ http://www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1764.html

² http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071130/ironic-yes-but-zuckerbergs-privacy-violated/

Tags: facebook, trust

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Snarky title aside, this telescope probably wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions from Gates and Simonyi.

 http://snurl.com/1wngv

"… a three-billion-pixel detector" that will produce "…30 terabytes of data each night".  Wow.  My question, of course, is where will all that data get stored?

Tags: telescope, microsoft, stars, astronomy

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This is pretty interesting.  As the blogosphere started to get into this story, I (and many others of course) already knew the plot, the main characters, and the cliff-hanger ending to "today’s episode".

Kara Swisher: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/

Techcrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/03/plaxo-flubs-it/

How? Twitter. 

You mean this Twitter?  Um, yes, that one.  Twitter is about instant whatever.

Tags: twitter, scoble, facebook

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