The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘change’

As you probably heard, yesterday, Twitter rolled out its revamped suggested users list (SUL). The list was a source of much controversy because those on it (including the @TechCrunch account) were assured to gain thousands of followers a day. And many of the accounts on it long enough had over a million followers. Obviously, many users not on it didn’t consider this to be fair — while plenty of those on it also thought it was kind of BS. After all, if you’re on it, and followed by a million people, any link you send out is likely to get many, many more clicks then by someone followed by a few hundred people. Even Twitter co-founder Evan Williams didn’t like it. So Twitter made a change. And guess what? It worked.

While the numbers coming in are still very early (only based on one day), it appears that across the board, those who were on the SUL before and after the change are seeing dramatic drops in the numbers of users following them each day. In some cases, SUL users are even losing Twitter followers now following the change.

While plenty were quick to note that the new SUL is more or less the same as the old SUL, just broken into categories, there is one vital difference: there is no way to add all the users on the lists with one click. This means that you now have to go through each user on the list one-by-one to add them, which most people apparently don’t feel the need to do.

I pulled these interesting new numbers are pulled from the site TwitterCounter. For example, the TechCrunch account (which again was on the SUL before and also is currently) went from gaining 2,979 followers a day on average, all the way down to gaining just 286 yesterday (and it’s actually a bigger drop because the 286 number pulled down the 3,112 average that stood yesterday when I checked expecting there to be a huge drop). Another SUL mainstay, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, went from gaining 2,184 followers a day to losing 162 yesterday. Same with Twitter angel investor Chris Sacca who went from gaining 2,892 a day to losing 68 yesterday. The main Google Twitter account went from gaining 4,908 followers a day on average to 893 yesterday. I could go on, but you get the point.

To be clear, the new SUL is still helping those that weren’t on it previously gain more followers. For example, Scott Beale’s LaughingSquid account wasn’t on the old SUL but is on the new one, and went from gaining about 51 users a day to gaining 151 users a day. But that’s a far cry from gaining 2,000 – 3,000 new followers every day.

Everyone will probably agree this new method is a much more fair and balanced way to help users find interesting people on Twitter. That said, those who were on the SUL before are now likely out of reach of anyone not on it previously. Well, unless you’re @billgates, who apparently doesn’t need the SUL to attract the masses.

Update: Twitter’s Doug Bowman has responded to this post in a tweet saying, “Exactly, and it was completely intentional.”

[photo: flickr/hape gera]

So Justine Bateman, you know, Mallory Keaton from Family Ties, completely lost her cool this morning with a bunch of people on Twitter. She kept noticing people she doesn’t follow showing up in her tweet stream and proceeded to publicly call them all “shitheads.” Of course, what she doesn’t realize is that this really is a feature and not a bug. And it could spell some trouble for Twitter if they don’t handle it properly.

The issue is that Twitter apparently enabled Bateman’s account with the new retweet functionality. Obviously, she wasn’t made aware of it, and doesn’t seem to know what the feature actually is. Clearly, she doesn’t frequent TechCrunch or a number of other tech blogs who have been covering this upcoming change extensively, because if she did, she would know that with the new retweet changes, users will now see the original tweets that are being retweeted in their stream, rather than a person they follow retweeting it. This means that people who you don’t actually follow could show up in your stream, which is exactly what happened to Bateman.

Here’s what she wrote to Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly) founder Jason Shellen:

Mr. Shellen, I don’t know what kind of deal you cut with TwitterBerry or how much it cost you, but suddenly you’re on my Twitter feed and I NEVER OPTEN TO FOLLOW YOU nor do I wan to.

I’m set to flame this incident all over the Internet. I suggest for the sake of your reputation on-line, YOU GET YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT TOGETHER, and stop attempting to shove your posts into other people’s feeds.

Sincerely, Justine Bateman

There have been plenty of other examples of her threatening other Twitter users who showed up in her feed too. Including blogger John Gruber and Twitter employee Ryan King.

Setting aside the fact that it’s mildly hilarious that Bateman thinks that somehow users are to blame for this, and that she thinks her lame Internet threats will put an end to all of this, there is actually a potential issue here for Twitter.

When the new retweet funtionality goes live, which should happen relatively soon, Twitter needs to make it very clear to all users that the change is happening, and what exactly it means. Otherwise, we could very well see a backlash similar to Bateman’s only on a massive scale.

As we’ve seen when Facebook rolls out changes to its site, users generally don’t like change, even if it’s for the better. The backlash that occurred immediately after Facebook rolled out their News Feed a few years ago is a perfect example of this. As is the backlash FriendFeed initially saw when it rolled out its real-time continuous updating system earlier this year. Both of those changes were for the better, and users eventually realized that, but initially they thought the company was ruining their experience.

I think Twitter’s new retweet functionality is in the same boat. It seems like it will ultimately be a positive change for the service, but plenty of users are sure to hate it at first. There’s not much Twitter can do about that other than explain what is happening very clearly and to say something along the lines of “try it out, give it a chance.” But if they drop the ball on the transition, potentially millions of users who have no idea about the change are going to wake up and think their Twitter accounts have been compromised by tweets of people they don’t follow.

If those users are thinking clearly (which Bateman clearly wasn’t), they’ll likely questions whether Twitter has sold them out and violated their privacy (which, of course, won’t be true, but that’s how it should look to those users not in the know). Or they’ll see it as another Twitter failure.

So in some ways, Twitter is lucky that Bateman seems to be a hotheaded user who doesn’t mind attacking people publicly on the Internet. She has given them a potential taste of what is to come. Twitter should look at her reaction and come up with a plan for how they’re going to explain this upcoming change to other confused users.

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LinkedIn tonight celebrated their 45 millionth user sign up, according to LinkedIn’s Marketing Project Manager Florina Xhabija’s Twitter message.

According to comScore, LinkedIn had 16 million worldwide monthly unique visitors and 331 million page views in June 2009, up from 7.7 million and 114 million a year ago, respectively.

The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last (2008) round of financing, and says they’ve been profitable for 2+ years.

LinkedIn has gone through numerous changes at the CEO role with founder Reid Hoffmanchanging the guard once again in June of this year after yet another change in December of 2008.

The company is a strong 2010 IPO candidate. Hoffman told us earlier this year “we can go public any time we want to.”

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I’ve been running Snow Leopard and just got yesterday’s update. I’m pleased to report that the Quicktime logo now looks like Robocop’s gonad. Look at this thing: it’s brushed steel, glowing blueness, and a big, bold Q all in one delicious package of “wow.” I haven’t noticed much in the way of UI improvements to mirror this change but man alive is this different

View post:
The new Quicktime logo is pretty… new

Not for nothing, but it looks like the sale of The Pirate Bay may well be in jeopardy. You’ll recall that the site announced last month that it had found a buyer in Global Gaming Factory

Read more here:
What a surprise: Sale of The Pirate Bay possibly in danger

When the iPhone 3G S was announced at this year’s WWDC conference, I first wrote it as the “iPhone 3GS” and was corrected by a colleague that according to Apple, there was a space between the “G” and the “S.” That seemed to be the case on Apple’s entire website. But today, with its million units sold announcement, I noticed that Apple has apparently moved to calling the device the iPhone 3GS — with no space. And I’m hardly the only one who noticed the change.

So which is it, Apple?

Obviously, this isn’t a huge deal, but considering how many people are writing stories, posts, tweeting, etc, about the device right now, you’d think Apple would like to have one correct name out there. But it seems that it’s not even sure. While the press release this morning has “iPhone 3GS,” the website still has “iPhone 3G S.”

As I’ve said from when the name was first rumored, I think the iPhone 3G S (or 3GS, for that matter) is kind of a silly name. Already, I’ve heard some people who are unclear if “3GS” just means multiple iPhone 3Gs. And then there’s the whole issue of writing iPhone 3GSs, plural. Plus, having played around with the device all weekend, I’m still not sure they shouldn’t have called it the iPhone 3G V — for Video.

I’ve contacted Apple for some clarification.

Update: According to a tweet from The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro, Apple has made the change to “iPhone 3GS,” citing Apple’s Greg Joswiak. Someone should probably let their website know.

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Deja Vu? Yeah, EchoStar paid TiVo over a $100 million a couple of years ago for infringing on TiVo ’s DVR patents. But it seems that EchoStar didn’t follow the court’s orders to disabling all the Dish DVRs that infringed on TiVo’s patent

Excerpt from:
EchoStar ordered to pay TiVo $103 million

When Mogulus launched in 2007, few people understood its name. Most people still don’t because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or I should say, didn’t make a lot of sense — because beginning today, the service has been completely rebranded as something much more obvious: Livestream.

Mogulus is making the change because it feels like the entire field of streaming live video on the web is on the verge of exploding in popularity, and it’d be hard to find a better name to take advantage of that, as CEO Max Haot tells us. Naturally though, this change would not have been possible without the killer livestream.com domain, which Mogulus acquired recently. Haot wouldn’t tells us how much they paid for the domain, but you can bet it was a very pretty penny. [Update: Domain Name Wire claims it sold for $100,000 - thanks Jeremy]

So now Livestream moves forward. Having just launch its super simple Procaster tool that allows for one-button streaming over video over the web, the first tool Livestream will launch is Broadcaster. It will offer the same one-click simplicity, but will do so completely over a web browser, without any software needing to be downloaded (which you need for Procaster — which is also more powerful).

Mogulus has seen some good growth over the past year in terms of visitors to its site, according to numbers from Compete. I suspect that will rise greatly with this new domain. But it’s the features that make users stick around, and this move to one-click publishing is a good idea — keep it simple, stupid, and all that. Haot also notes that Livestream has over 1,000 paying Pro members, the premium service it launched last year.

So what was Mogulus going for with that name? Well, as you can kind see in the now old logo, it was Mogul-us, as in “anybody can become a media mogul,” Haot says. Yeah, Livestream is much, much better.

Disclosure: Mogulus advertises their Procaster product on this site.

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Twitter just went through an awful 24-hour stretch. It included taking away a feature some people loved, probably being misleading about it, getting a huge amount of backlash, halfway bringing the feature back, and getting railed by the press for it all — with bouts of downtime mixed in for good measure.

This is hardly the first time Twitter has had everyone up in arms, and it won’t be the last, but it’s pretty astonishing how the company seemed to solve one problem by creating two more. Sure, it’s easy to play desk-chair quarterback, and probably a bit unfair — but it’s also fun, and a good cautionary tale, so let’s do that.

Here’s how the past 24 hours at Twitter went down:

Problem 1: Twitter yanks the option to see @replies directed towards people you don’t follow.

Why it was odd: Because it was just an option, and not the default setting. Users will never like options being taken away from them. Why remove an option? Well, we’ll get to that.

Problem 2: Twitter writes a blog post explaining that the change will “better reflect” how people use Twitter. It claims this is based on usage patterns and feedback.

Why it was odd: Has Twitter learned nothing from Facebook over the past few years? If you’re going to make a change, even if you’re sure it’s the right one, let the users know before you do it. That’s true even if you have no intention of listening to feedback — which may also be the right play, more on that later.

Problem 3: Prominent Twitter employees start tweeting about their distaste about the change. This includes tweets of uncertainty from CEO Evan Williams.

Why it was odd: If you really are making what you think is the right call, don’t waffle — and especially don’t waffle on the service you created to let everyone see your thoughts in public. Users will pick up on this waffling, smell blood and go in for the kill.

Problem 4: Twitter writes a post the next day containing the following sentence, “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt…”

Why it was odd: This absolutely should have been in the first post on the matter. Hell, it should have been the key subject of the first post. Now it just seems like Twitter was being purposefully misleading about the reason it removed the option. I was at dinner the previous night discussing this change. Everyone at the table agreed it was clearly done for scaling purposes, if we all knew that, why did a co-founder of the company have to be “reminded” about it? He didn’t. It was just a mistake not to be honest about that upfront.

Problem 5: Twitter goes down for its scheduled maintenance, the second such one during the middle of a work day, in a week.

Why it was odd: Poor timing. Users wanted to discuss this new post and give feedback to Twitter via Twitter, but could not.

Problem 6: Twitter follows up that second blog post with a third post just a few hours later saying it is halfway reverting the changes.

Why it was odd: Halfway doing something is never a good idea. If you change something or don’t change something you will piss off some people, but if you half change something, you’ll piss off all those people.

Problem 7: These changes appear that they will make the service much more complicated.

Why it was odd: Keep it simple, stupid. That’s how Twitter was born, how it grew and why it is what it is. Twitter is trying to placate its users with these convoluted changes — that is just not a good idea in my book. Do or do not, there is no try.

Problem 8: A server failed, making Twitter unusable for several hours.

Why it was odd: Insult to injury.

A bad day: It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but it’s also no stretch to say that Twitter badly mishandled this situation. It’s not entirely clear if it was the very small percentage of users using the feature (3%, according to Twitter API lead Alex Payne), or if it was the taxing of Twitter’s servers that led to the decision of the removal. It was likely a combination of the two that was borne out of the latter. But that needed to be stated from the get go.

Removing an option, no matter what percentage of users use it, generally doesn’t seem like a good idea. Those who do use it, clearly love it, and others probably like the idea of having that option as a safety blanket of sorts, just in case they ever want to use it. That’s not to say it can’t be done — but if you’re going to do it make sure you’re 100% committed to removing it.

At the end of the day, the product is yours and you should be the ones making the call on which features stay and which ones go. It’s of course good to listen to your users, but most of them probably have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to your product, so it should almost never go beyond listening. If it does — as it did today with Twitter — there’s clearly a problem.

A plan that wasn’t thought through will lead to these types of days. Of course, Facebook has had plenty of these, as has Digg and so has Twitter (on a much smaller scale) — apparently, history repeats itself. Who knew?

In terms of the actual feature removal, I’m up in the air about it. I kind of like the idea of simplifying my stream by removing @replies to users I don’t follow. I might miss that at first, but eventually I’d forget it was ever an option. At the same time, it is a good discovery tool — especially for new users.

But what absolutely needs to happen is very clear to me: Twitter needs to either kill it completely or bring it back completely. When you start introducing conditional statements into the equation, it very quickly complicates things. That has never been what Twitter is about and should not be what it becomes about. As I said, it’s their product, but in my opinion, that would be a mistake.

But what has me even more worried is the longer term second solution. You know, the new feature talked about in the third post that will give users “far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow.” That sounds a lot like the convoluted social tangle Facebook has created due to the privacy concerns of its users. As an asymmetric social network, Twitter shouldn’t have those issues.

But there’s a potential ray of hope in this second solution: Filters. I want Twitter to keep the service simple and stay bare-bones, but it really needs a high level way to filter the people you follow. Yes, other services do this, but having it on Twitter actual could eliminate the concern about too much noise in @replies. It is working beautifully for FriendFeed, and is starting to work for Facebook.

There’s a way to redeem yourself from today’s fiasco Twitter: Remove all data restrictions and simply give us filters. But maybe don’t listen to me — I’m just another user bitching, after all.

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File-sharing service VIPeers has released an upgraded version of it’s peer-to-peer media discovery and sharing tool PUMP, as reported on TechCrunch France. PUMP is touted as the “iTunes for video”, but it’s exactly much more than that and rather similar to apps like Miro and Joost.

Update: forgot to mention that you need an invite code to download the software for now. Fortunately, we get to give away no less than 15,000 for TechCrunch readers. Code: PUMP-TECHCRUNCH-USA-15000.

PUMP is a desktop application that lets you search for and download the Flash versions of videos from a variety of services, including YouTube, Dailymotion, BitTorrent search engine Mininova, Jamendo, LegalTorrents and Google Torrent, and the results are presented in orderly tabs. You can even opt to include any other search engine you think is missing from the list. Videos can be played in practically any format and shared from within the interface on a multitude of social networks like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. The app even doubles as a full-fledged Web browser and podcasting tool thanks to the ability to import RSS feeds into the system.

It makes for easy management and discovery of videos, but what I really dig about the service is that is able to sync and convert content from both your imported iTunes and local PUMP libraries to your iPhone, iPod Touch or other mobile phones. It’s also a full-fledged BitTorrent client, which is little surprising considering VIPeers is also the company behind torrent sharing client Podmailing. Of course, we would never suggest that you’d be using PUMP to download any copyrighted content or anything.

The downsides: only available for Windows Vista and XP for now (it also uses IE for browsing), an uninspired UI and a bit of a memory drain. But don’t let that spoil the fun.

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