JegBeg

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

This morning I was doing some stumbling around the intertubes and found a really cool site promoting the use of compact flourescent lighting and LEDs in place of traditional incandescent lighting. While the substance of the site is right on and definitely a message I like seeing promoted what struck me most was the design of the site. It’s done in flash with a playful fun attitude. Be sure to visit the “Hooray Australia” area to hear the Australian national anthem as played by a guy in a kangaroo costume using a keytair… awesome.

Unscrew America via StumbleUpon

PS. Follow my twitter feed for fresh links day in and day out.

Cheers,

J

This morning our friends over at Google announced some updates to Docs and Spreadsheets. Most of the changes are purely visual with the introduction of new icons and a new layout for the main document list page. The most exciting new feature is the introduction of folders. Until now, Google has been a hard line supporter of the tagging method of organization and has not included folders in any of its apps. It seems they may be giving a nod to the users and bloggers out in the cloud that have long whined for folders in GMail and other apps. I have to say, in the short time that I’ve spent with the new Docs and Spreadsheets, I’m a fan. Finally we have an alternative method of organization to the old “Active Documents” hoo-ha that came with the old Docs and Spreadsheets app. I do wish that Google could give us the best of both worlds, folders for organization and tags for searching, but I’m not here to complain or make demands. Overall, thumbs up to this most recent update. Keep up the good work, Goog!

TechCrunch is running a story about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announcing a new type of computing device called “Surface.” Effectively it is a multi point touch screen interface mounted in a table top that also is able to recognize objects set on the surface. I haven’t had time to dig in too deeply but from the video in the TechCrunch post this has the potential to be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

-J

Read more on Techcrunch

The Official Google Blog points out that Google has implemented a mobile version of Google Calendar. Simple point your mobile phone’s browser to http://calendar.google.com to see your calendar and add events. Though you can’t edit events via the mobile version, it’s nice to see Google bringing more of their apps to the mobile phone space. Now if we can just get Google Docs for mobile, the mobile web desktop will be complete!

-J