Come for the Ride…

Twitter - whether you know what it is or not is the one company (next to Yahoo!) that has been in the news in 2008 for its ability to fail.  What started out as the golden child for social media experts and early adapters now face constant struggles to stay alive.  Let’s face it… when your designers need to get cute with multiple ERROR screens because there are several ways to kill the system - that’s a problem!  Sending out a hot vet assistant telling me my dog has cancer does not make the issue any easier to swallow.  The choices are to operate or to put it down. Note: multiple hot assistants wouldn’t help either.

What irks me about the Twitter platform is that it’s being used as a live communication device.  A few of my friends have subconsciously stopped emailing me and have instead turned to direct messaging me on Twitter to get my attention.  That’s fine for recreational purposes or as updates to their status on a microblog but when things are important or when things need my immediate response, Twitter is still failing miserably at this.

In the last week or so, I’ve noticed overall updates have been down.  Whether that’s people abandoning the platform or Twitter’s throttling their usage, I don’t know.

I’ve noticed with the most recent Twhirl upgrade, Twitter has dropped its hourly API quota from 70 down to 20 requests per hour.  First off, just because you managed to keep your system alive (barely) on life support, doesn’t mean it’s still good or useful for the general public.  If email only allowed 3 gets an hour or if cell phones only allowed access to calls and data within some throttled time blocks during the day, would it still be useful for communication?  Would anyone trust it enough to rely on it knowing it’s in a constant state of cripple?  The answer should be “No” to the above 2 questions.

I’m really baffled as to why Twitter think it’s okay to scale it back to this level of service when its indirectly competing with other forms of communication.  It’s like a rat competing to be the messenger in a room full of pigeons.   Let’s be real here… the only time I would personally accept a delay in live communication to the point of crippling the experience would be if we’re doing live chat with someone who lives close to the Sun.  Being that it takes light 8 minutes to travel between Earth and the Sun, I guess I would have to settle for delayed responses even though I’m sure engineers would try to find a way to make that closer to real time than Twitter’s proposed solutions.

Maybe they need to hire some real startup people - you know, the ones who have built extraordinary things without the luxury of doing so in a funded startup.  I fail to see how $15 million (and more) can’t create a stable system… at the same time, maybe they should just shut it down and start over.  Sometimes it just makes more sense to buy a new car than trying to fix a lemon.

First marketing test with KillerStartups bombed - majorly. The entry was submitted over a week ago along with a clean copy of our logo (on white background w/o the beta text) and it finally received approval just short of 8-9 days. We received an email (one that’s broken in Gmail) stating their team had reviewed our website and that it was kept in the site-reviews section. (So I guess this means we didn’t make front page news.)

So not only was the submitted logo not used, a good chunk of the submitted text was also missing from the submission. Upon trying to modify the entry, many items were reset to the default value instead of being pulled from the DB - which was extremely hard and frustrating to use. Not only that, we were crammed between Fuddruckers and Head and Shoulders. Seriously?

Overall, I’m not expecting to get more than 10 referrals from this effort and I am also shocked how this experience completely differs from the one we had with YouNoodle.com. For those out there who are trying to get on this site, I would probably recommend you get someone to nominate your site instead of submitting it directly. Like the Webby awards - you seem to only win if you are nominated.

As much as I love Andrew and VCWear, the second he started promoting it I was thinking someone should create a similar company for entrepreneurs. After all, we all need funny shirts and preferably one that was cheap and high quality so we can wear it every day until it disintegrates. (Cause that’s what entrepreneurs do.)

While I would have loved to ride the fame of VCWear and start another t-shirt company, I really couldn’t think of any funny ideas that would have made it worthwhile. Luckily, someone did! The shirts at StartupWear.com really speaks to me - some samples are below.

Yep! Guilty as charged on most of these accusations. Now if they would offer a free shirt in exchange for a blog post and a referral to the StartupWear.com site, I’d be set for my wardrobe for a few months.

For people that don’t Twitter or know what it is, the concept of micro-blogging and live blogging may be hard to understand. After all, most social media news you read today still focuses on Facebook and MySpace and neither one has been making headlines due to their built in blogging abilities.

So what makes Twitter so popular? Well, I tried to answer that question awhile back but I couldn’t because I wasn’t a power user. However, after 4 months of using Twitter via the web (reloading Twitter.com); then progressing to twittering via IM, Twitterrific, mobile texting to 40404 and so on, I’m glad to say I’m finally getting the hang of it.

Like all social networking applications, the app is worthless if you live in a bubble. To fully appreciate the power of any social network, you need to have an established network! Once I started stalking following people, the whole point of Twitter finally made sense.

For the most part, I’ve been following social media experts and various angels and VC’s who have been the first adopters to Twitter. While I did not personally go to the Georgia Technology Summit or SXSW, the people that were there all gave a pretty detailed play-by-play of the events. What struck me was that Twitter in this usage, allowed you to pass notes to each other during the seminars! (Something I’m sure all of our inner child had the desire to do since the 4th grade.)

Another pro to micro-blogging is that it can be written closer to real time and you don’t have to sit in front of the computer for 30 minutes to draft out your thoughts. If social networks keep your close friends and acquaintances at an arm’s length, then Twitter really brings everyone closer to an earshot of a whisper. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the people I follow on a more personal level. Sometimes I learn about their trips and at other times, I can help them with simple computer issues. For the more famous people in the industry who keeps a professional front, they definitely appear to be more approachable when you follow them day-to-day.

But what if you don’t use Twitter and you simply don’t get it? Well, luckily some guy decided to produce the video below which explains Twitter in plain English.

For those of you who chooses to use Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/wei_yang. Also, I would love to know what you use the service for.

To help with product adoption, one of the things we’ve been thinking about is creating online tutorials for non-savvy internet users. Even though we try to make our service easy to use and intuitive, I’m sure some people will still have issues finding things on their first try. To help minimize the number of calls for troubleshooting, online demos (if done right), will be a huge time saver!

While I’m sure there are a number of screen capturing tools out there that can capture mouse movements and help create videos, the thought of creating and syncing audio and video in one shot seem pretty daunting; at least for me who hasn’t done it before. Luckily, a compromise between the two extremes exist in Slide Share.

SlideShare.net allows you to post your pdf’s, Power Points and some other formats to create slide shows on the web. The slides can then be embedded onto a blog or page similar to YouTube videos. You can also create slide shows with sound which is exactly what we needed. For an example, check out the slide below.

| View | Upload your own