Jeff Stalnaker

Dear Twitter,

Seriously, you’ve got to get your shit together. Like many others, I love your concept. You fill a niche in the social web that no one else before you even addressed. You’re adding new users everyday. Some of us have come to rely on you as a quick and easy way to spread news, stay in contact with our friends, and even remind us to water our plants and turn off the lights.

Despite all of this goodness, you’re really starting to disappoint me. I am now trying to wait out your third outage this week.

So far, I’ve tried my best to be understanding. Your user base and popularity are growing at a pace that baffles the mind. As a developer, I can understand scalability problems and how difficult they can be to solve. But, you had to know that you were onto something when you launched and that rapid growth was inevitable. You should have planned accordingly and had a scaling strategy that could accommodate this kind of growth. You choose Ruby on Rails probably so that you could be agile and push out new features and bug fixes quickly, a decision I understand and respect, however it seems to be failing you now.  I won’t slam you for things you did in the past that you can not change now, but I will hold you at fault for not addressing problems when they arise.

This scalability problem is getting out of hand. The outages are starting to turn people off and now you have competitors to worry about. If you can’t stabilize yourself your most dedicated users will start abandoning you for other services that may lack your features but are at least available consistently. If you can’t handle any more growth, maybe you should stop accepting new accounts. I doubt this would help you long term, but perhaps it would stop the bleeding long enough to solve the problem and prevent an exodus of your users.

I’ve even considered leaving. The only thing keeping me around is the fact that I invested a considerable amount of time convincing my friends to jump on your bandwagon and I don’t want have to explain to them why they need to switch to something else (a affair I already went through when I moved from MySpace to Facebook).

Consider this your intervention. I love you enough to keep using you and want you to stick around. Please, Please, Please don’t me regret making you a part of my online life. If you do, I’ll never forgive you.

Cheers,

J

Update: Even before I finished writing this, it seems you’re back up. Maybe you are doing something to combat this problem

Engadget is running a piece announcing the arrival of a YouTube app on Tivo Series3 and HD boxes. I recently bought an TivoHD and after playing with the online and TivoToGo features, I noticed the absence of YouTube and many other online streaming video sites from the feature set. I can’t wait to start surfing YouTube from my couch.

With this, Tivo continues its long run of outdoing every other DVR manufacturer out there and truly making their box the center of the entertainment universe in the living room. Here’s to hoping they keep it up and add something like Joost.

J

I’ve been a big fan of Joost since I managed to get an invite a couple of weeks ago. In fact, seeing what Joost has to offer I’ve even considered ditching cable TV and going the Home Theater PC route all the way. Until now, getting in on all the Joost goodness has been a difficult process. You needed to either pester your online buddies or go forum / blog trolling to find someone giving away invites. Some sites, including Techcruch have been advertising link give-a-ways. As of today, Joost and TechCrunch have teamed up to give away invites to anyone who comes by. Well, at least the first 10,000 anyones who come by. So, if you’re still in the dark and want to find out what Joost is all about jump on over to http://www.joost.com/presents/techcrunch/ and get your invite. Hurry, supplies are limited.

Cheers,

-J

Update: I also have some Joost invites available. Leave your info in the comments and I might be kind enough to give you one.

Update [2]: It looks like TechCrunch aren’t the only ones to strike a deal to give away Joost invites, Ars Technica and some others seem to be in on it as well.

[From Digg:] A collection of art pieces depicting the volume of various kinds of American consumerism

read more | digg story

It looks like Google is test driving tabs on the personalized homepage. This popped up while browsing this afternoon, then disappeared after a page refresh. Personally, I can’t wait to unclutter and categorize my homepage widgets.

Update: This is now not going away. Looks like its for real and here to stay. woot!