The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘clients’

Something’s wrong with uTorrent, the de facto Windows BitTorrent client. The client’s implementation of uTP has drawn the ire of certain private BitTorrent sites, saying that it favors uTorrent clients above all others

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Is uTorrent ruining Western Civilization as we know it? (And how big is BitTorrent still? Inquiring minds wants to know.)

One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything. We fought over the fine print in the contracts after the meat of the deal was ironed out by CEOs. Skinning and dressing whatever the hunters bring back to the cave is fine for some people. But it’s not exactly being in the middle of the action.

PR firms today aren’t much different than corporate lawyers. They are paid to perform a service. They like to think of themselves as core to the strategic action of their clients. But more often, they’re just there to spin whatever happened in the most favorable light possible. Then they smile and dial and pray for coverage. Occasionally they are called in to smother a story, which is mildly more exciting, I imagine. But when a CEO is wondering what she should do next to drive her business forward, she generally doesn’t call her PR firm for advice. Or at least I hope she doesn’t.

PR firms are apparently just as frustrated by always being in the back seat as the law firms are.

I’m fascinated by Clair Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times today about PR in general and the birth of a startup, Wordnik, specifically.

Forget the tech blogs, said investor Roger McNamee. Brew PR head Brooke Hammerling instantly acquiesced, and decided to go with a sort of guerrilla approach instead by “whispering” into the ears of prominent Twitter users like Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and Jason Calacanis. CNET was also given the story, but it managed to eek out only a single comment.

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

The result? Not much. Wordnik is flatlining at an abysmal amount of traffic. Comscore and Quantcast don’t even register the site as a blip.

Compare Wordnik to Topsy, another recently launch service. Topsy launched on TechCrunch exclusively. The domain now has 577,000 results on Google, compared to 56,000 for Wordnik. And the traffic difference is stunning:

I’d say this experiment in a pure social media launch failed.

The article goes on for pages describing Hammerling’s incredible networking skills and propensity to namedrop at every opportunity.

Ms. Hammerling’s connections have been crucial for Brew in finding and serving clients, says Ms. Cook, her business partner: “Without question, that allows us to play at a different level, because we’re not just doing P.R. and media relations; we’re connecting people at the highest level, helping deals get done.”

I know Brooke well. I guess you could say I’m one of her many thousands of “very close friends.” And I don’t dispute that she is well connected, or that those connections help her get clients.

I believe Brooke’s client have been better served if she stood up to McNamee and told him that Wordnik would have had a better launch if they hadn’t ignored the blogs that are interested in covering new startups. Instead she became a “yes woman” and told McNamee exactly what he wanted to hear.

Hammerling and her peers in the industry should help guide their clients through the minefield of journalists and bloggers, rather than simply avoid it entirely out of fear or ignorance. She isn’t in the room to drop names or “help get deals done.” She’s there to make sure the client’s news gets spread appropriately. In that they failed miserably, and the client suffered.

As cool as Kevin Rose is (and he did apparently Twitter that Wordnik was “truly amazing”), this is not a launch strategy.

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One of Twitter’s greatest assets has always been its developer community. But with the countless link, image, and video sharing services available (many of which are very similar to each other), most new services are lost to obscurity. When it comes to determining which services will succeed, the popular Twitter clients hold all the keys. If you’re integrated with one, you’ll be at the fingertips of hundreds of thousands of users who wouldn’t have otherwise known you existed. Getting chosen as an application’s default service can lead to skyrocketing popularity overnight. These Twitter clients are home to some very valuable real estate, and now some of their developers are looking to profit accordingly.

We’ve been hearing from multiple sources that TweetDeck has been toying with charging a fee for services to appear in the popular Twitter client for some time now, so we turned to the company’s founder, Iain Dodsworth, for answers. He says that no services have paid up until this point, but that by the time the next version comes out, that will change. Unsurprisingly, Dodsworth wasn’t willing to go into the details of the arrangements, but we’ve been hearing it will cost services around $50,000 to appear in TweetDeck. We’ve also heard that there might be an extra fee to become a default service, but this information is less concrete.

It also sounds like only some services will be asked to pay to appear in TweetDeck, while others will be included for free, which makes sense. The application would have a hard time omitting a service like TwitPic without raising quite a few eyebrows. But for those link shorteners that are a dime a dozen, particularly the ones that are just getting started, a fee would be much less surprising.

Now, let me be clear: I don’t think there’s anything particularly sinister about this. It’s a natural progression of the Twitter ecosystem. Developers have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise they’re going to be presenting users with an increasingly overwhelming and redundant list of options. So they can either subjectively pick out their favorite services (or perhaps the most popular ones), or they can charge for their spots. In theory they could also allow users to manually specify their own shortener and image sharing services (in the same way you can specify the default search in your web browser), but the number of people who would actually do this would be negligible.

That said, I do have concerns. My biggest issue is that TweetDeck, or any other clients that adopt a similar model, could show favoritism to services that are clearly inferior simply because they have larger pocketbooks. At this point many of these third party services (particularly the URL shorteners) are very similar, so I don’t particularly care if my link goes out through one or the other. But if TweetDeck starts defaulting to a service that isn’t very good, or refuses to integrate an up-and-coming new service that users are clamoring for, then we’re going to have issues.

As for other clients, TweetDeck’s competition has largely avoided the practice of charging for integration. Seesmic Desktop doesn’t do it - in fact, it rotates the default services for each install to maintain neutrality. And Tweetie, the very popular iPhone and native Mac client, doesn’t charge either (though it does generate revenue through premium versions and integrated advertising). But now that the dam is breaking, I suspect we’ll hear about more applications, particularly the free ones, adopting similar pay-to-play models with their integrated third party services.

That TweetDeck is among the first clients to do this isn’t very surprising - it’s the most popular Twitter client, and the company has also raised funding, which means it has to appease investors with some actual revenue. The company has also recently experimented with a branded Blink 182 version of TweetDeck, and Dodsworth says that more revenue streams are on the way.

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A spam-less Twitter feed might just be too good to be true. Spam is becoming an increasing problem on Twitter and something has to be done to separate the wheat from the chaff. Spammers are using Twitter as a tool by replying to your @username, which then causes the Tweets to show up in your timeline. There isn’t really a way to filter Twitter spam directly from a Twitter client. But there may be soon.

Loic Le Meur has proposed to add a “report as spam” button to the Twitter desktop clients his company has created, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. This button would flag the spammer to Twitter (or to a separate database of users) and Seesmic or Twhirl could then exclude the spammer from its client apps after a sufficient number of users report them as spam. Le Meur also says that the clients would manually check the potential spammers to ensure that they are actually spammers.

After the clients are established as spammers, Twitter could then delete or block the user accounts. Le Meur says that his Twitter clients will soon include a “report as spam” button and is calling on fellow popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck and Tweetie, to follow suit. The one potential issue with the flag button, says Le Meur, is that Twitter prefers spam to be reported by a direct message to its spam account “@spam.” But you need have @spam to follow you first (it seems to be autofollowing) before hitting the flag button on a Twitter client. It’s an extra step the user would have to take to make the button usable, says Le Meur.

Flagging is a good idea and a great first step to battling spam but what Twitter really needs is an Akismet-like plug-in. Akismet, created by Wordpress developers, filters link spam from blog comments and trackback pings for blogs. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to a blog site, it is submitted to Akismet, which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether it is spam. Akismet says that its plug-in has caught 10.7 billion spam comments from blogs since its launch in 2005.

There are a few Twitter applications that let you flag possible spam, but none are tied to the Twitter desktop clients, like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetie. Twimailer gives you a suped-up version of the standard New Follower email offered by Twitter, by providing the user’s Bio, Follower/Following numbers, the user’s last 10 tweets and the ability to block and report spam directly from the New Follower email. Twerp Scan scans through your followers and flags Twitter users who could be potential spammers. You can control the filtering options that determine who is a spammer (i.e. number of followers vs. following). But Twitter may have to develop or license its own spam blocking software if the problem becomes more prevalent.

>Information provided by CrunchBase

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The Cloud is looming large, offering us ways to store and share our data in ways that were never before possible. We can effortlessly share our documents and photos with our families and friends, while maintaining control over their spread using powerful granular privacy controls. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the cloud isn’t ready for us. Because the services we rely on are letting us down with a frequency that is simply unacceptable.

I’ve been putting this post off for a while, mostly because I didn’t want to point to a single breach and call it a trend. But in only the last two months, we’ve covered at least three major web services that suffered security lapses tied to software bugs or scaling issues. In our posts covering these problems, one of our commentors will inevitably say something along the lines of, “that’s what you get for uploading your data to X service“. And the more problems I see, the more I’m beginning to agree with them.

For a recap, let’s revisit some of the problems we’ve recently seen.
In March I wrote about a bug in Google Docs that would share your files with people whom you’d never given access to. Granted, it would only share these files with contacts you’d previously interacted with, and not the entire world, but this did little to ameliorate the issue - in some cases it would be better to share a supposedly private document with a stranger than a coworker.

Two weeks later, we were alerted to a bug on Facebook that would allow users to circumvent any ‘limited profile’ lists they’d been placed on by their friends. For example, if you had placed your boss on a ‘Limited’ profile list so they couldn’t see your latest party photos, they’d be able to get around it. This ‘exploit’, if it could even be called one, was so easy to carry out that I’m sure many people did it accidentally.

Finally, earlier this week Twitter posted a note to its Status blog saying it was having issues with “misdelivery of direct messages”. In other words, some supposedly private messages were being routed to the wrong users. Given Twitter’s problems with bugs in the past this didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s unnerving nonetheless.

When faced with such security lapses, most services try to downplay them by pointing out how few people (relatively speaking) were affected. In the case of the Google Docs issue, Google promptly explained that only .05% of all documents were wrongly shared. But when we’re talking about userbases of millions, even an apparently trivial percentage becomes significant, with thousands of people affected. What’s worse, I’m sure this sort of phenomenon is far more common than we realize. The other services involved just aren’t big enough (or honest enough) for anyone to notice.

So why is this happening? There seems to be an accepted notion among many engineers that as their service scales, there is no way that it will be 100% secure. To some extent, I acknowledge and agree with this. Very smart people are always going to be trying to access valuable data by whatever means necessary, and complex security exploits are unfortunately a fact of life on the web. But that doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable for the service to wrongly share user data simply because of a bug. It’s the difference between having your bank apologize for losing your money because someone robbed it, and it telling you that the teller accidentally withdrew a few thousand dollars from your bank account and handed it to someone else. This sort of thing just can’t be happening.

My real issue with these security lapses isn’t so much about the misdirected messages or the wrongly shared photos - the odds of these being truly damaging really are quite low. It’s that these problems serve to undermine the public’s trust in ‘the cloud’. Once we get past the security problems, having our data immediately accessible no matter where we are is incredibly valuable - and probably inevitable. It’s only a matter of time before our health records are going to be stored online in some form, simply because having instant access to them can be lifesaving. But if the public loses faith in the integrity of their data stored online, or the security measures protecting it, then it could take years to regain its trust.

So what can we do? Though I’ve dabbled in programming for years, I unfortunately am not an engineer by trade (a fact that I’m sure opponents of this post will promptly point out to show that I can not possibly know what I’m talking about). But the answer seems clear regardless. If an application is cracking under load, or is too complex for its own good, then new signups and features should be put on hold until the damn thing actually works properly. The word ‘private’ should not mean “this will remain hidden until we accidentally break something”.

To close, I want to make clear that I understand that these engineers are dealing with extremely difficult problems, scaling their incredibly complex services at unprecedented rates. And I respect the hell out of that. But the more often issues like these pop up, the more the general population is going to distrust the security protections of these online services, no matter how good they eventually become. Which is why we need to sort these problems out now.

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