Community Blogs

More than two years ago, I made a post on here about how I didn't get Twitter. It's one of the most popular posts I've ever made for some reason, which perhaps I'm not proud of. I been meaning to follow up on that for, well, at least a year, because obviously things have changed a great deal. My view was skewed in some respects because I never looked at it much outside of the context of technology circles. In its earlier days, Twitter was dominated by attention whoring tech pundits, and that seemed boring to me. These days, it enjoys more widespread use, but there are still some critical points that measure how effective it is as a communications medium, and furthermore, it serves different people different ways. That 80% of...

This makes me laugh, in light of tech pundits who overstate the importance of Twitter. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Biz Stone www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum Read More...

I've poo-poo'd Twitter before, because I haven't found it to be anything other than another channel to keep up with, but I'll try being active about using it whilst at Mix this week. If I make meaningful connections (and find fun people to hang with at the Tao party), I'll officially change my tune and see the value. http://twitter.com/jeffputz Read More...

The new gig I started in December as the company's technical architect ("technical" to make the distinction that it's not "information architect") has been an interesting experience for me thus far. My experience at Insurance.com was excellent in so many ways, because the processes were entirely solid and my peers were rock stars without the ego. Getting laid-off from there sucked, but it also presented an opportunity to find something where I could lead processes and have that "enterprise" experience applied to a place that needs it. My new employer has been primarily a creative marketing endeavor for most of its history, and app development has been a smaller part of their business. Appropriately, their...

As I posted earlier today , CoasterBuzz has now been around for nine years. That's a fourth of my life! In that time I've been married and divorced, owned three cars, had eight jobs, wrote a book and God knows what else. It's a long time. In the last year or so in particular, I've had to really stop and think about what the site means to me. I'm not the hardcore roller coaster enthusiast I used to be. I think it peaked in 2001, a year where Stephanie and I went to around a dozen parks in one year. There were so many new rides being built back then. That was also the year I committed to CoasterBuzz being a real business enterprise, largely out of necessity. In order to support the traffic to the site, I had to get a T-1 to...

It seems like a good post from the folks at Twitter has been interpreted by Scoble as being all about him . I gotta say, I'm just not seeing it. I'm also not sure why Scoble is throwing such a public tantrum about Twitter's down time. Regardless of what you think about it all, there's a strangely familiar pattern I've seen when it comes to the tech-centric "2.0" apps and what typical software development has experienced for longer than I've been doing it. Scoble is the big power customer, much like an executive for an internal line-of-business product at any corporation. Alex the Twitter guy is like the product manager trying to explain technological problems to the executive who can't be bothered with the...

There was some controversy surrounding Twitter's non-reaction to dealing with some allegedly harassing posts recently , with the noise being made by a user who is reasonably well known in certain tech circles. (The fact that she works for competitor Pownce I think is irrelevant, but some are making noise about it.) Basically, Twitter is making a lot of stupid statements in public and not owning up to, well, what they own. They can do whatever the hell they want, but for some reason doing what's right is not high on their priority list. I've been running community sites now for ten years. Our terms of service have been pretty straight forward, and we only boot people for various -ism's and hate, harassment and spamming. Contrary...

Twitter scores another $15 million, and it's worth around $80 million. So let me get this straight... A Web app with no business model that basically blogs short entries and aggregates them is worth $80 million. Doesn't that feel very 1999 to you? Read More...

It's weird how bloggers, gossip types and "Web 2.0" company founders and execs have developed into this strange pseudo-celebrity sphere, where many of them are constantly stroking each other. What's unfortunate about it is that the podcasts, blogs and other media I've consumed from the tech world are becoming hopelessly out of touch. I know I've previously blogged about this with regards to Leo Laporte and the This Week in Tech gang's comments about how "nobody uses .NET," but reverse awareness is also getting out of hand. This post from Scoble is one of countless about Twitter , and it's hopelessly out of touch. The comments on the post seem to concur. Twitter has become something of a flagship for...

Robert Scoble annoys me. I used to enjoy reading his blog, but it has gone to a point where he really thinks he has all the answers and is the smartest blogger on the Net, masked thinly by the occasional self-deprecating comment or whatever. But now he got booted off of Facebook because he was using an automated script to take all of the contact information from his 5,000 friends and dump it into Plaxo. Are you seeing the irony here? This is the same guy who called out Zuckerberg at Facebook for screwing with people's privacy and not owning up to it. Are you kidding me? Here's the big news flash, Scoble... I added you as a friend to see what you were up to, not so you could suck out even my name and e-mail and put it in some other system. Why...