So once again I've tried to pre-post things and once again the system lost them after a couple days.  Which means I have no automated posts to put up.  So this is it for me until the 9th (again, I'm on Blog-cation).  But there was one thing I'd been thinking of lately so I figured I'd throw out a quick post on why I don't use Friendfeed or Twitter.   Before I get started let me just say that this is a "me" thing.  There are a lot of things I say here that I think should apply to everyone but this isn't one of them.  If you love these services than more power to you. 

But you won't catch me using them much (I do have a FriendFeed account just so I can post the occasional comment)

Here's the thing, when you come to this blog (or read the feed) it takes time.  Even if you only skim the entries I'm taking a small part of your time away from you.  So when I write an entry I feel that's something I need to keep in mind.

It's a responsibility as far as I'm concerned.  You've chosen to honor me by giving me a piece of your time so I in turn need to make sure I only make use of that honor when I have something worthwhile to say.  Because I'm, in my own small way, cluttering your life.  I'm putting one more piece of information on your plate that you need to deal with.

So I owe it to you to make sure that piece of information is at least worth the time it takes for you to skim it and move on.  

In my view Twitter and Friendfeed are contrary to that goal.  They are services designed to make it as easy as possible for people to post which in turn encourages people to put very little thought in to what they chose to share.  That's my fear.  If you like this blog enough to follow me to either of these services I would, in my own mind, be taking advantage of the trust you put in me by coming here if I acted in that way. 

Essentially I'd be hijacking even more of your time to tell you something that doesn't have any value to you (like what I had for lunch). 

So that, in a nutshell, is why you won't find me on Twitter or Friendfeed.  I don't have anything against the services and I certainly don't fault anyone else for using them but I personally don't feel comfortable with it. 

That said, if you're curious I just ate a Pastrami Sandwich and am now going to buy a Printer. 

Prologue

First, this is an automated post since I am on vacation, just so you know. 

That said, pardon my "posting three consecutive posts on a topic" thing.  The fact is I wanted to have an automated post so the blog wouldn't go dark for 5 days and this, which was originally part of the last post, got so long that it made sense to give it an entire post of its own. 

End Prologue

(I'm not sure that was actually a prologue since it has nothing to do with the actual post below, but anyway...)

One of the biggest ironies of the whole discussion of "Federated Servers" is that Twitter's nature does not lend itself to Federation.

Ask yourself, what do people like about twitter?  Generally its that they can communicate in real time but using a "broadcasting" model (as opposed to one-to-one like IM).  But one of the most important points there is that the communication has to be in real time.

Federated services such as smtp based e-mail are not in real time.  There are communication problems between servers, network errors, servers going down, and other various incidents that can often times prevent an e-mail from being delivered instantaneously.  As someone who runs an e-mail server I can tell you first hand that it isn't abnormal for an e-mail to be several hours late. 

But if that same thing happened to a Twitter like service it would absolutely ruin it.  The whole point to microblogging is "the timeline" 

Messages coming in at different speeds or coming from different servers who might not be in sync time wise can end up causing a lot of trouble.  You start to get scenarios where, for example, all of someone's tweets for the day aren't delivered to their followers until 11pm when a server problem is fixed.  Then the receiving server has to decide whether all those messages get marked based on the reader's time of receipt or the senders time of post.

In e-mail this is an easy thing because messages are treated as individual entities.  But in a service like twitter where the updates are part of a timeline and not marked as read or unread things can get confusing. 

If you insert stalled messages in at their time of post the reader is likely to miss them because they'll be checking for "tweets" posted after the last time they checked.  If you in turn insert stalled messages into the time line at the time of their receipt you completely kill the linear aspect of the service. 

Ever wonder why all these IM compatibility initiatives have died on the vine?  Its because its next to impossible to create a federated service that works in real time.   It may be possible to federate a Twitter like service but its one heck of a challenge and not one that's going to be solved by Identi.ca's fairly simplistic implementation.

I'm about to leave for a long weekend but before I do I wanted to put some brief follow up thoughts to the whole Identi.ca thing.  In doing so I wanted to make the point that I'm not actually trying to bash the program.  Anyone who goes to the effort of writing a program, putting up a server, and sharing it all with the community deserves praise.  But that doesn't mean we should ignore the flaws in that system. 

With that said, here are some things I didn't cover yesterday...

Wanting To Believe

Without quoting anyone specifically the general sentiment from those who were praising Identi.ca seemed to be...

"Its lacking features but I'm sure they'll be implemented soon"

The irony here is that an open source project is less likely to implement features quickly.  Say what you will about the monstrous amounts of money being pumped into startups the reality is that millions of dollars goes a long way towards implementing features quickly.  An Open Source project relies on the free time of the people involved which is a recipe for slow implementation. 

But people want to believe in this so they twist the facts to fit their desire.  It never ceases to amaze me how easily people can convince themselves that what they want is the likely outcome even when every logical factor is stacked against them. 

I love this spec so much that I'm just about to start reading it

One of the things that surprised me the most is that people were willing to jump right into supporting the openmicroblogging.org spec even though they obviously hadn't read it.  Had they done so it would have become clear that it doesn't account for a lot of the basic Twitter features.

In recent years people seem to have strayed from the concept of approved standards because the approval process takes so long.  But it pains me to see us having gone so far in the other direction that we are encouraging others to put up servers based on a protocol that's completely unvetted.

Happy Days Really Aren't Here Again

Even more shocking to me is the fact that people are giving this credit for things it doesn't solve.  If you want a decentralized Twitter this doesn't seem to solve your problem.  Sure, other people's servers might stay up, but you still won't be able to post to yours.  So if your problem is that you can't post during server outages this really doesn't solve that problem.  In fact, given Twitter has multiple servers while anyone implementing this will probably only have one, it might just make your problem worse. 

This product is great, just don't click on that.  Or that.  Or that. Or that...

The most interesting part of the reaction to Identi.ca is that half the time I tried to click on a link and I got a message asking me if I wanted to download a file with an unrecognized MIME type.  I'd think this was a configuration problem on my side if those same links didn't work the other half the time.

I can't be the only one who had this problem so my question is: Why did no one mention this?  I couldn't find it once in all the blog posts about the service. 

Again with the Open Source

This is a reiteration from yesterday's post but it really bugs me.  Open Source is great.  I personally learned a lot from people who made open source programs available.  But when talking about actually USING an open source program the fact that its open source is only valuable if there's a team of people dedicated to working on it. 

Despite what some advocates would have you believe 99.9999999999999% of programmers wouldn't go anywhere near open source projects because (a) they program all day and don't feel like doing it at night, (b) there's a huge disincentive at the outset because you have to learn someone else's code backward and forwards, and (c) coordinating efforts between other programmers who are doing something part time is a huge pain. 

The point about learning someone else's code is the most potent of these issues.  You can't just jump in and start coding on a big project.  Doing even the simplest thing requires you know every subsystem you'll be interacting with backwards and forwards.

So when ReadWriteWeb says...

Can it work, work it scale? At least it's open source so the development community doesn't have to play armchair quarterback for a black box like they are with Twitter.

Or Ewan Spence says...

I suspect that with an Open Source code base they’re going to get a lot of eyes looking over problems and tweaks

They're being naive.  Twitter's has experienced programmers whose full time job is to sort out its problems and look how far that's gotten them.  Finding code bugs in a large program that you aren't intimately familiar with is next to impossible.

As far as program functionality goes, the truth is that a good plug-in framework is way more useful than open source is. 

I Could Go On All Day

I don't want to belabor the point anymore but hopefully you see what I'm saying.  There are a lot of questions  here with seemingly no answers.  The blogosphere seems to think appending "Open" to the name of something instantly makes it either Golden or destined to be Golden but that really isn't the case at all.

Maybe this will take off and maybe they will implement every feature that Twitter has but until they do it seems premature to consider this a viable Twitter alternative. 

P.S.  To anyone in the U.S., enjoy your holiday and remember: No explosion, no matter how cool, is worth the loss of a limb.

Well ok, maybe a REALLY cool one but lets face it, you can't afford those kind of Fireworks.  If you could you'd also be able to afford someone to light them for you.  

So Twitter has some competition, sort of...

Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services.

If you've become interested in the paradigm changing model of communication popularized by Twitter but have been frustrated by Twitter's frequent down time or other shortcomings - then Identi.ca could be for you.

Sounds very exciting doesn't it?  All your prayers have been answered you disenfranchised Twitter lovers.  But wait, there's more...

Coming "Soon"

Identi.ca just launched today but lists a number of features it says are coming "soon," including SMS, URL shortening, cross posting to Twitter and other services, a more AJAXy interface and much, much more. Exciting.

There is no "replies" tab on Identi.ca, but Twitter users will already be accustomed to that, right? We hope that functionality will come to Idneti.ca quickly.

What now?  But...But...I thought this was the deliverance? 

OK, all joking aside, this is something I've mentioned before and something that happens to be a really big pet peeve of mine.  Open Source is not a feature unless you actively plan to use the source to improve the product.  Otherwise it's useless to you. 

The only reason this half baked offering is getting any press attention at all is because its Open Source.  If not for that it would be laughable.  Not only is it inferior to Twitter in every conceivable way but its built with basically no resources so if everyone does rush to it you can expect it to crash faster and more often than Twitter does. 

Oh, and on that note, if everyone rushes over there one thing they won't find is an API.  That's right, dig a little deeper and you find this isn't really even as "open" as Twitter in that it doesn't have an API (support for the Twitter API is another "planned feature"). 

So basically its just like Twitter it just lacks everything you love about Twitter.  

The one thing I will give it credit for is that its the first product (if you can call it that) to demonstrate a model for a federated microblogging service (meaning others could put up their own compatible microblogging services and exchange messages between them).  But since the site only seems to be coming up sporadically for me I can't look into that to see how effective their model is. 

So while this could be the start of something significant right now the offering is pretty weak.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm an advocate of Open Source but if these initiatives want to succeed than they have to create products that can compete in the marketplace with closed source options. 

Otherwise they're just wasting everyone's time. 

I have been critical of Steve Gilmor's writing style in the past.  Something about a person writing in a way that seems designed to confuse people seems downright immoral to me.  But today is a day of celebration because Mr. Gillmor has actually produced....wait for it...a completely coherent post.

Yes the logic's still a bit fuzzy and the focus is still a bit rambling but every sentence is profoundly understandable and that deserves a shout out.  In order to do my little part to prove that speaking clearly inspires dialogue and to hopefully encourage coherence in the future I felt the need to pass on some link-love. 

So without further ado, Steve says...

About noon Friday here in California, I happened to click on a Summize tab substituting for Twitter’s Track functionality and monitoring the use of my Twitter screen name. Someone named Scrabo had tweeted “Rumor here at NBC is that Tim Russert passed away”. A minute later another: “@stevegillmor Brokaw getting ready to go on air.”

Turning on NBC, then MSNBC, then CNN, I found nothing: reports on flooding in the Midwest, breaking news about a bomb attack in an Afghan prison, a strange obliviousness on the NBC outlets. Something about the first tweet resonated - “here at NBC” - and I went back to the computer and Summize, finding another tweet directed at me that said Wikipedia was already updated with the news. Jumping to the New York Times, a single line at the top of the home page. Finally, at 12:33 Tom Brokaw broke into programming with the news.

I've gone over the inaccuracy of Twitter more than once so I won't rehash that.  Instead, I wanted to say something about expediency.

Three kinds of News

The way I see it there are three types of news that we all consume.  Those are...

News requiring some reaction: Natural Disasters near those you love, disastrous turns in Financial Markets you participate in, and anything else that might require you to act quickly falls into this category.

News requiring your attention: This includes things like the various positions of political candidates, news on stuff that will make you healthier, and other things you should probably know but which don't necessarily require you to do anything.

Idle Chit-Chat: This includes the various goings on of celebrities, heroic things done by Children and/or Puppies, and other entertainment based news events.

The point I'm making with the above distinctions is a simple one: There are different types of news and they require different types of delivery mechanisms.  Most people have lives that require them to pay attention to what is happening to them which means they only want their attention drawn away if they need it to be.  Like in the case of news needing them to react in some way.

Situations needing a reaction have systems already in place

Here's a funny Twitter fact: Its only been around for a couple years.

Here's a funny life fact: People have needed to react to natural disasters and stock crashes for far longer than a couple years

Here's my not so funny point: Any news that requires a reaction from you already has a system to deliver that information immediately.  Financial companies will send you a text message if your stocks are dropping, the USGS has an Earthquake Notification System (via SMS) and every other type of news requiring an immediate reaction from you is going to have a system that informs you immediately.

Oh, and those system's won't require you to comb through tons of people talking about what they had for lunch in order to find that news.

The benefit of ignoring other news

That brings us back to Mr Gillmor's point in regards to the other type of news.  The thing to remember here is that you don't need to know the other types of news in real time.  In fact, it can be detrimental to do so. 

In Mr. Gillmor's example he brags about finding out about the death of Tim Russert before anyone else.  In it he says...

But an event such as Russert’s death and the emotional shock wave it produced put the lie to the notion that this stuff is echo chamber or A-List or whatever. 30 minutes before the world knew about this tragedy, someone I don’t know reached out and established a connection based on mutual affinity.

Given that quote I ask you: don't you think it might be advantageous to hold off on learning news that will send an "emotional shock wave" through you until after your work day is over?  Rather than spend the rest of it distracted and completely unproductive? 

Expediency is not always a good thing which is probably why there aren't already systems in place to deliver that type of news in real time.

So what have we learned?

Twitter is a nice service for those who enjoy it.  Nothing more.  Trying to attach importance to it by saying it delivers news faster doesn't hold a lot of water. 

(oh, and let me finish by saying one more time that the news it delivers is completely inaccurate)

One last thing to regular readers of this blog.  I want to apologize for again tackling the whole "Twitter News" thing.  I know I promised not to.  But I felt the special circumstances warranted a quick revisit.  I'll definitely shy away from here on out.  I PROMISE!

Addendum: Michael Arrington posts a Qik Video follow up to the post here in which he tries to clarify what Mr. Gillmor was trying to get across.  Basically the point he was trying to make, if I'm getting this right (the video cuts off at a weird point), is that Twitter allows people to connect in a personal way over things that happen in real time.  I can understand that point on an intellectual level and I think that's a big reason why people who like Twitter use it.  For me personally though I don't see it.  It takes a lot more than a 140 character summation of events for me to connect with a person who I don't know.  I assume when someone famous dies there will be other people who are touched by it so for me to connect with someone over it I need to know that something specific about their sorrow jives with my own experience.

A couple days ago I posted on a TechCrunch post that "called out" Twitter on their architecture.  Twitter responded here with a pretty standard "things are screwed up but we're trying real hard to fix it" post.  I don't have a problem with that, I think its their best course of action at this point.

But one response did bug me.  Here's the quote...

Q: Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?
A: We currently use one database for writes with multiple slaves for read queries. As many know, replication of MySQL is no easy task, so we've brought in MySQL experts to help us with that immediately. We've also ordered new machines and failover infrastructure to handle emergencies.

Honestly, this is one of the things that really bothers me about the startup community.  There's this idea of "we use Open Source even if it's not up to the job." 

The tasks that Twitter has "brought in MySQL experts to help with" are tasks that one person could easily do with a MS SQL or an Oracle database.  Even someone with very little expertise could get through it with a $40 book or a $245 support call.  Say what you will about MySQL being free there's just no way it's cheaper in the long run. 

Not only that, feature for feature even the Standard Edition of MS SQL Server (Retail Price $6,000) handily beats MySQL.  I'm all for using Open Source Software but not if it means creating inferior technology. 

Here's the thing.  There are a lot of technology tasks that Enterprises do badly.  But the one thing they do well is to keep things running.  My cynical nature suggests part of the reason for that is because a "non-techie" boss won't realize if your system is badly designed but will realize if it isn't up.  Whatever the case, Enterprise customers look for solutions that don't go down. 

So while the Web 2.0 world is better off blazing its own path in aspects of social design and user interaction they can learn a lot by emulating Enterprise in areas of IT infrastructure.

For the record...Though it has nothing to do with the post I feel the need to give a quick thanks to Microsoft.  As a non-profit Microsoft gives us very generous terms (95% discounts in most cases).  So when I was faced with this decision it was a lot easier to pick the more capable system which in turn made it a lot easier to focus on solving actual problems rather than administering databases.

Briefly following up on the Twitter situation from my last post, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posts a short list of extremely pointed questions for Twitter.  In it he says...

So I have a couple of questions, too, based on a couple of discussions I’ve had with people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture.

• Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?
• Do you really have a grand total of three physical database machines that are POWERING ALL OF TWITTER?
• Is it true that the only way you can keep Twitter alive is to have somebody sit there and watch it constantly, and then manually switch databases over and re-build when one of the slaves fail?
• Is that why most of your major outages can be traced to periods of time when former Chief Architect/server watcher Blaine Cook was there to sit and monitor the system?
• Given the record-beating outages Twitter saw in May after Cook was dismissed, is anyone there capable of keeping Twitter live?
• How long will it be until you are able to undo the damage Cook has caused to Twitter and the community?

 

Now, to a certain extent this is Mr Arrington realizing what type of posts sell and taking advantage of that fact at a normally slow time (the weekend).  But there are a couple of interesting issues here.

On the technical issue: If half of this list is true than Twitter's infrastructure was built by a complete amateur (and that's being generous).  Or maybe more accurately a programmer who didn't understand the first thing about IT infrastructure.  Whatever the case it shows a business with no idea where to turn when it came to building a solid infrastructure.

To my eyes this is endemic of an industry that has (a) allowed academia to abandon relevant experience and (b) refused to regulate itself with certifications. 

Computer Science programs focus almost completely on theory while Information Systems degrees focus largely on business so both create candidates with huge gaps in their knowledge.  Beyond that the only certifications that exist are from individual vendors and those are more marketing than they are verification of knowledge.  So you get an industry where it's impossible to identify who knows what they are doing (unless you ARE someone who knows what they are doing)

Everyone from Doctors to Plumbers have professional certifications to verify their knowledge.  That's why you don't need to be a Doctor to hire one.  The fact that Twitter, one of the most scrutinized companies right now, has such a painfully insufficient setup suggests it might be time for the IT industry to look into ways to verify its members.

On the Blaine Cook issue: Since the first serious tech job I ever had there has been a constant in the industry.  Companies always insisted on Non-Disclosure agreements and tech workers always hated them.  Recently that policy has started to lift and Mr. Cook is just some of the fall out. 

After seeing the damage he's done I can't help but wonder if Twitter isn't a lesson in why they are necessary.  At least after termination (you could have someone agree to it at the time they are hired).  Transparency is great until your ex-employees turn on you and once that happens they can do some serious damage to the company as a whole. 

NDAs after termination keep your ex-employees from destroying the morale of your current ones. 

 

Anyway, its about time for me to get ready to go out for the night but I wanted to throw out those two quick impressions before they got forgotten amidst other weekend activities. 

So this is kind of funny...

On February 8th, 2008, Israel of AssetBar.com wrote a really informative post entitled "Twitter Proxy: Any Interest?"  In it he pointed out this fundamental problem with Twitter...

Nothing is as easy as it looks. When Robert Scoble writes a simple “I’m hanging out with…” message, Twitter has about two choices of how they can dispatch that message:

1. PUSH the message to the queue’s of each of his 6,864 followers, or
2. Wait for the 6,864 followers to log in, then PULL the message.

 

The trouble with #2 is that people like Robert also follow 6,800 people. And it’s unacceptable for him to login and then have to wait for the system to open records on 6,800 people (across multiple db shards), then sort the records by date and finally render the data. Users would be hating on the HUGE latency.

This post was later quoted by Dare Obasanjo which led to an angry response from Robert Scoble where he said...

First of all, Twitter doesn’t store my Tweets 25,000 times. It stores them once and then it remixes them. This is like saying that Exchange stores each email once for each user. That’s totally not true and shows a lack of understanding how these things work internally.

Second of all, why can FriendFeed keep up with the ever increasing load? I have 10,945 friends on FriendFeed (all added in the past three months, which is MUCH faster growth than Twitter had) and it’s staying up just fine.

Now, with no offense to Scoble, this is a fundamentally ignorant assessment of what is actually going on.  A fact that almost every technical minded person pointed out to him.  The best of those posts, imho, was from Nick Halstead where he says...

In a recent post Robert Scoble tries to explaining how twitter works by saying that twitter is using some form of ‘pivot table‘ - (my terminology for what he explains) and says that a model that others have put forward (i.e. a de-normalized system of inserting messages into everyones queues) was akin to microsoft exchange, now these two examples are so horribly not connected - and I won’t rant about how BAD exchange is efficiency wise, but please Robert do not get into any technical arguments please.

(Its a great post that the above quote doesn't do justice so everyone should check it out)

This led to the same question being presented to the authors of the official Twitter technology blog.  Their reply was to basically confirm what everyone had been saying...

charles asks if there's anything users can do to lighten our load. 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.

A response that Scoble quickly took offense to saying in his link blog...

“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!”

So there you have it, a little background on what has become a huge mess for Twitter. 

Honestly, I don't have much of an opinion on the human drama part of this (other than to find it pretty amusing).  Is Scoble being unreasonable?  Absolutely.  But that's somewhat understandable when you consider the fact that everyone is pointing their fingers at him when he essentially did nothing wrong.  The truth is, Twitter loved Scoble signing up 25,000+ followers when it meant drawing users in to the service. 

So for him to be slapped on the hand now for it is a bit obnoxious. 

On FriendFeed, there are two issues there.  One,  the model by which people monitor other people's FriendFeeds is not like the model that Twitter uses which lowers their back end problems and two, FriendFeed has far fewer users.  If they were trying to deal with as many users as Twitter I suspect they'd be having problems as well. 

One final point I'd like to make is regarding the root cause of Twitter's woes.  A lot of people have tried to lay this on the feet of Ruby on Rails which is a bit unfair.  With that being said, Twitter's problems do belong at the feet of the "Rails Philosophy" which was set down by its creators 37Signals.  Here's a quote from their e-book "Getting Real"...

You don't have a scaling problem yet

"Will my app scale when millions of people start using it?"

Ya know what? Wait until that actually happens. If you've got a huge number of people overloading your system then huzzah! That's one swell problem to have. The truth is the overwhelming majority of web apps are never going to reach that stage. And even if you do start to get overloaded it's usually not an allor-nothing issue. You'll have time to adjust and respond to the problem. Plus, you'll have more real-world data and benchmarks after you launch which you can use to figure out the areas that need to be addressed.

I've never thought much of the 37Signals gang and it is quotes like the above one that are the reason why.  Putting off your most difficult technical tasks until later is an utterly stupid thing to do and is, as Twitter is now finding out, disastrous if you can't quickly address the problems.  37Signals wouldn't necessarily know that though because their most popular application has fewer users than a program I wrote at 19.  Yet they still speak as and are treated like they are leading experts in application design. 

They're not. 

Not only that, a lot of their advice is outright bad as this Twitter solution proves.  This is all symptomatic of a larger problem on the web which is bloggers' not questioning who they treat as an authority.  Anyone who realistically looks at 37Signals will see that they are still a fairly small development firm.  That doesn't mean they haven't done some impressive things or that their opinion has no merit at all.  But it needs to be put in context and people don't seem to be doing that. 

Had the Twitter architects done that they wouldn't be in the situation they're in now. 

Addendum:  This occurred to me as I was hitting the publish button of the above post.  When you go to the bank for a new business loan what is the first thing they ask you for?  A 2-Year Plan.  That's because no sane institution lends money to anyone who has no idea where they are going or how they plan to get there.  Given that I ask you, doesn't the same apply to technology issues and in particular scaling? 

I've been on the Internet since around 1st grade and in that time I've been a part of a lot of communities.  What I've noticed is that building a  successful community often means allowing elements into it that you don't like or approve of.  The extent of that depends on how open a community you want but as a general rule the more you want people to freely express themselves the more you have to allow unsavory elements in.

Keep that in mind when reading this excerpt from a post by Ariel Waldman 

In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager and received a response that let me know they cared about the situation

The harassment continued throughout the course of 2007. Since Twitter and I had an open dialog started, I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment.

The story goes on but the gist is that Twitter refused to ban the aforementioned name calling user despite Ms. Waldman's continued pleas for relief. 

I think my first reaction to this was the same as most people's.  Ms. Waldman seems like a nice person, nice people don't deserve to be called names, anyone who calls a nice person names is a bad person, bad people deserve to be banned. 

What's there to debate? 

Well, a lot as it turns out.  The question here isn't "is the person doing the name calling bad?"  I suspect everyone on the Twitter side dislikes this person and wishes they weren't using the service.  The question though is, short of things that are against the law, does Twitter want to become a service that imposes management's values on its users?

Values are not absolute and one person's harassment is another person's "open expression".  I completely understand where Ms. Waldman is coming from and wish she wasn't being subjected to this but again, an open society can be unpleasant. 

Honestly, I have to grudgingly admit I don't consider the quoted name calling harassment.  I don't like it, but since Twitter allows you to block users I think the name caller would have to rise above simple posting to constitute harassment.

If Ms. Waldman blocked the person and they created another account to continue the name calling you might have a case for harassment but as told the story doesn't seem to rise to the harassment level.  I mean, its the Internet, where a lot of people encourage others to hate them while outwardly decrying it to get publicity.

Values are relative

This comes back to what I was trying to say in my opening paragraph.  If you want your service to be an open platform that represents society than you have to permit the elements of society that you don't like.  That includes bad people who call nice people mean names.  I wish this name caller would just go away and leave her alone but I don't think I have the right to make them.  I suspect the people at Twitter feel the same. 

Addendum: For the record, I didn't mention Ms. Waldman's primary claim which is that Twitter should ban the person for violating their Terms of Service agreement which says users won't “abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users."  Honestly, with no offense intended, I don't consider this argument to have much merit.  ToS agreements are to protect the company and they are free to enforce them as they please.  Most companies allow violations of their Terms of Service all the time and we all know it. 

Addendum 2: I didn’t realize it when I posted but it turns out the account Ms. Waldman wants shut down is in fact an account in which people can post anonymously.  So it isn’t a person with a twitter account it’s one of many people who use the account to post anonymous messages.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that changes anything but I thought I should put it out there.

I thought it had something to do with Ohio - Brigitte Dale

 

 

 

I've long been a fan of Brigitte Dale (whose web site can be found here).  But after her take on Twitter I have to say my affection for her has grown ten fold.  Check out the video embedded above. 

I don't know what the deal with the Chicken is either btw.  But she's from Nebraska so that probably has something to do with it.  Maybe people in Nebraska just randomly have Chickens roaming around their neighborhoods.  One of my neighbors has a peacock that sometimes gets out and I'm in Southern California so it isn't that weird.