I could wait until Easter, but this is too good...

The FAIL Blog

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Twitter needs to level with us and open up about their problems

@jack, @biz I'm not going anywhere... at least not for a long time.  So, don't consider this a threat to go over to Pownce or anything. 

In fact, anyone who threatens to move isn't really thinking properly, because if we all moved to a different service at once, I'm sure we'd experience the same issues. 

But, posting blog posts titled "Happy Happy Joyant" when you've had so many outages lately and your user base has little confidence that you're going to scale for the Superbowl and no confidence that you'll make it through SXSW without a hitch...  its just not the right sentiment.

You guys built a fantastic service and we all love it, but we've all seen how scale problems can take down a business.  (Friendster) And while the service is popular, it's not THAT popular.  Most of your userbase is still pretty technical and it wouldn't really take much more of this before people started leaving en masse.  It's exactly because they're pretty tech savvy that you have a unique opportunity to open up a discussion about your recent problems and engage your userbase.

Let's start a discussion about whether Ruby scales or how you diligence a host.  Is it a matter of just throwing more hardware at the problem or are database and architecture redesigns in order.  If I were Lee Mighdoll, I'd make it a point to blog almost everyday, even a short one, about the problems I'm facing and steps I'm taking to address the issues, so at least people feel like something's getting done.

Take a cue from Six Apart, who experienced serious uptime issues in the past and seems to have gotten over them.  If nothing else, their tone during and immediately after their problems was the right way to go.

"We are truly sorry for the frustration and inconvenience that you’ve experienced, and will provide as much additional information as possible as soon as we have it."

The Twitter blog hardly ever provides any information and there's yet to be a discussion of what the scaling issues are or timely accoutns of them.

Here's another post where they Six Apart recapped exactly what happened with one of their outages:

"Before we get into the details, we want to reiterate just how sorry we are for the inconvenience this has caused. We know our customers rely on us to provide superior service and performance, and that on Friday we let you down. The fact that Friday's outage came on the heels of our performance issues in October is obviously frustrating, both for you and for us."

Then they go into a pretty lengthy blow by blow account of what was going on.  People want to know that because they want to feel like something's being done. 

You guys should know that from dealing with your cable or phone companies as a regular consumer.  Waiting in silence for somebody to fix something sucks.  And it sucks even more when the service doesn't level with you about the fact that their are issues. 

"Happy Happy Joyant" just feels like mocking, to be honest, and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. 

Here's your opportunity to be an "us" company or a "them" company with regards to this issue.  It's a critical point in the life of your young company. 

I'm rooting for you guys to approach it the right way.    

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Videos and Pictures from the Marilyn Manson Show at the Hammerstein

I don't think the multimedia in this post needs much explanation, other than the fact that, while I enjoy the music, I just want to make it clear that I do not condone all of the behavior that the music of the artist describes or inspires. :)

Photos

Videos

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Etsy Raises $27 mil... Accel and Jim Breyer comes in. Score one for NYC

Nice work folks.  I like the fact that this can only serve to make Rob Kalin more confident, because sometimes, I think that can be an issue with him.   :)

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

Seriously, though, put $27mil. on the venture funding in Brooklyn toteboard.  No sleep 'til...   

Congrats!

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Now pitching for the New York Mets: Johan Santana (Assuming they can throw enough cash his way)

Once the Mets wrap up his contract in the next couple of days, Johan Santana will be pitching for the New York Mets...  in the National League.

Anyone want to take a guess what his numbers are going to be like?  I think it's fair to say that he's a lock for 18 wins and a 2.50 ERA.  In '04, he whiffed 265 batters.  Now, he'll get to face pitchers about 80 more times a year than he does now.  Can we say 300k's? 

The best part is, everyone seems to be in agreement that we got him for a song.  I liked Carlos Gomez, too, but I don't think the guy's ever going to hit .300.  I think the guy will wind up being an Alfonso Soriano type, without as much power...  bat .280, hit 25, steal 35, but whiff 130 times and rarely take a walk.  And the pitchers we sent over?  Meh.... You never know with pitchers.  Plus, Santana's only going to be 29 this season.

The Mets off-season went from a disaster to a huge victory in the blink of an eye, and you gotta hand it to Omar Minaya for getting his guy without giving up too much.

So I'm trying to figure out when Santana's Shea debut is.  I say its Saturday, April 12th, because clearly he starts opening day, but the Mets have two off days in the first 10 games... so they'll use Santana, Martinez, Maine, and Perez, with a day of rest, and probably use Santana again that first Sunday on the road against Atlanta.  It wouldn't make sense to push him back, because they're off that Monday, too, so it would be a week in between starts, and I doubt they're rushing to get El Duque more starts than necessary.

Anyway, nothing is guaranteed, as we saw last year, but with the best rotation in baseball, the Mets now have to be frontrunners for the World Series on day one.

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Subway Thumbing

There's a man sitting across from me reading "The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God". This small paperback has a picture of some little figure, perhaps the distant cousin of a WeeMee, shooting himself in the head with the bullet exiting out the top in a small burst of splat. So, if I seem distracted this morning, its because I'm keeping a close eye on that guy for sudden movements.

There's a short girl standing next to me reading a a magazine article about traumatic brian injury. Very few other people are reading. I'd love to see an analysis of time of day, whether a person is reading, catching up on zzz's, playing video games or listening to their iPod or some combo.

This train is unquestionably a zzz train. I'd say that 60% of the people in this train have their eyes closed. It's 7:20AM and I'm on my way to Fordham to teach class. There's a banana in my tummy, but I'll def need my MetRx shake when I get back to the office at 10:30AM.

I gotta remember to tell my students to allow anonymous comments on their blogs.

There are two City Year girls on the train. They're in there big red winter coats. Those coats look pricey. I wonder what percentage of City Year donations go to buy coats for volunteers. Couldn't they just get hats? I never see them actually working or sponsoring anything...just collecting money. What does City Year do anyway? If my kid ever wanted to stand on the street and collect money for charity, I'd hand them a donation that covers there summer (if I had it) and tell them to go be an intern in a program management or policy making department within a non-profit or government sponsored social program. I think that's where you make a much bigger impact, especially since most donations come from corporations anyway.

I just switched to the 6 train at Union Square... I plenty of time to get to Grand Central. Look, there are Dominican Academy girls on this train...haha. DA!

Girls from DA were the first girls you met in Regis because we had a joint fundraiser with them in October... a Walk-a-Thon around the Upper East Side and the park, which basically meant that everyone in Regis dated a DA girl in freshman year. But I was cool because my DA girl was a sophomore. She taught me who the Ramones were. I feel like I told this story before.

This guy just walked onto the train. He's a dead ringer for Chin Ming Wang...and he's wearing a Yankee cap. Only... he's obviously a high school student.

Call me a big dumb male, but I don't get it: She looks like a snow angel to me. Isn't that a scarf and boots?

Women, are you really offended by this ad?

I kinda feel like we have bigger fish to fry.  At least this model is pretty well covered up.  If I had a daughter, I'd rather her look at ads like this in Times Square than ads of half-naked women in sexually suggestive poses.  Isn't that a much worse objectification of women?

I dunno about you, if this ad makes you want to shoot things at women's crotches, I sort of feel like maybe you had some issues before you saw it.  Me personally, it makes me wish for snow.

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Keep Pier 40 a place for people, not big business

A few years ago, the Hudson River Park Trust evicted the Downtown Boathouse from Pier 26 in order to make way for a brand new pier, similar to the one we moved into up at Pier 96. We knew we'd likely be back, but, in the short term, that left us without an actual Downtown Boathouse location.

Then I heard we were moving a few kayaks to the south end of Pier 40. Of course, typical buracracy delayed the permit that would have allowed us to put a dock down for months and months. That meant that we started our Pier 40 program in 2006 midway through the summer. It started very slow. Construction around Pier 40 meant that you needed to walk halfway past the whole Pier to figure out how to get to us. The neighborhood saw the demolition at Pier 26 and thought we were gone for good. They didn't know anything about the "Downtown Boathouse" as an organization...they just knew about the free kayaks at 26.

Little by little, we started to get more and more traffic to Pier 40. I was there helping to run the program there every weekend. When we started up this season, we hung a big kayak by the jogging path with an unmissable arrow.

People climbed over concrete planters to get to us rather than figure out how to go around. Regulars to 26 started returning.

Pier 40, with only 15 kayaks, no trips, no classes, skyrocketed in popularity.

What also happened was that the whole Pier became a destination. We took people out for a paddle who otherwise couldn't get into the sold out trapeze school on the roof. We took kids out after the soccer games they played on the fields indoors, or runners who normally didn't think much about what was going on inside the pier, and previously just ran around it.  Pier 40 became even busier than our main location uptown. 

And now, the Hudson River Park Trust is voting this Wednesday on one of two commercialized proposals for the development of Pier 40.  The only politician who seems to be on the side of the people is State Assembly Member Deborah Glick.  She wrote an editorial regarding the Related Companies' proposal:

"Unfortunately, Related’s latest proposal for Pier 40, though it has improved from previous versions, remains one for a mega-entertainment center, complete with Cirque du Soleil as the anchor tenant, a huge banquet hall, 12 movie theaters and several large restaurants. Such large-scale uses do not belong on a pier in the midst of a park and bear no relationship to the park. Uses like Cirque du Soleil are not water-dependent and serve no local need. They could be just as easily — and more appropriately — located on 42nd St. or 52nd St. Related’s latest plan, which is expected to draw 2.7 million visitors each year to Pier 40, would substantially impair the park’s ability to serve as a safe and quiet respite, since it would bring large numbers of vehicles across the busy bike lane, endangering walkers, runners and bikers. In addition, the proposal would only add to the area’s congestion issues, running counter to the city’s traffic mitigation efforts in Lower Manhattan."

There's already a major movie complex right down the street, by Battery Park.  And Cirque du Soleil?  I doubt that most of the 20,000+ people who went kayaking with us last year can afford the Cirque du Soleil ticket price.  Plus, most of those people would probably have more fun if the trapeze school were given room to expand and they could fly through the air themselves versus paying more to watch other people do it.

Plus, last time I checked, we're supposed to be building a PARK, here right?  Isn't that what it's called?  Hudson River PARK.  Go ask a five year old what belongs in a park.  I don't think he'll answer banquet halls, movie theaters and restaurants.

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Outside.in launches discussions: How to fight the sound of silence

Outside.in, which is one of my favorite NYC startup teams, launched their discussions feature very quietly last week.

It's something similar to when Zillow launched their neighborhood and discussion features.  Zillow faced the aggregator problem of not having a site where people normally contribute directly to the site and now opening up a centralized community feature.  The great thing about these sites is that they reach out and find the community and bring it to you, but discussions require that the communities are on-site.  

My suggestion to Zillow at the time was to go seek out some Outside.in content.

Now what do I suggest to Outside.in?

I thought they should start pulling the comments off of the blog posts they aggregate and using those to start discussion.  The discussion topic could be my blog post title or some summary, and the comments could show up as discussion comments on Outside.in.

Wait... but isn't that "stealing" the community from my blog??

No, not if you resyndicate the comments back to my blog and leave them there.

So, someone could find an article from my blog about Bay Ridge through Outside.in, leave a comment right there on the Bay Ridge discussion board, and I get the benefit of the comment.  And vice versa, any of my comments get resyndicated out to Outside.in.

What would be the net effect of my traffic?  I'm not sure, but even if I sacrificed some of my Outside.in traffic, I'd get lots more comments and probably engage my own users a lot more, because they'd think of my blog as a much more lively place.

Also, maybe each comment on the last.fm discussion board could permalink back to my blog...   "Comment syndicated from This is going to be BIG!".   So, perhaps I'd get even more traffic with a whole new set of links.

Either way, it's going to be tough sledding to cause people to get interested in a new discussion board in a place they don't usually do community stuff on... and so I think you need to start greasing the wheels with some aggregated content. 

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links for 2008-01-27

• 12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO - socialmedian
  (tags: entrepreneurship startups)