Community Blogs

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...

The nice thing about Digg and social sites and RSS is that you can absorb a crap load of content around stuff you're interested in. Unfortunately though, I'm starting to realize that "crap load" is exactly what it has become. The problem is that all the people doing the writing take a simple view of what they're covering and gauge its relevance on that. They form opinions that ultimately aren't useful because they lack context from the things they're covering. Certainly the iPhone has been the biggest target as of late. It doesn't do Exchange support well, I can't install 3rd party apps, my iPhone was bricked by an update... etc. Why is it that none of this matters? Because it's a segment of the population that is so minor and so not part of...

I was listening to This Week In Tech this morning, as they were talking about various services and Web sites they use. It occurred to me that, while many of these sites are very fascinating, most are me-too at best, or worthless at worst. Certainly you're familiar with Wayne Gretzky once saying that he skates to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. (I can't prove that, but I'm sure it's online somewhere.) Well, so much of what makes headlines out there has been done many times over. Everyone wants to have social networking now. Sorry, but unless Facebook makes some colossal mistake, you're too late. The party is over. All of this link sharing and super high tech community junk is neat, but how much do you need? The problem is...

Apple fan or not, people seem to be annoyed that Apple is not opening up the iPhone for application support on the device itself. It's not just the Windows developers who are annoyed, it's the faithful Apple developers too. But why? This is the point we've been trying to get to for years! When I worked at Penton Media back in 2000, a B2B rag/tradeshow company, we internally talked about how cool it would be to do Web-based CRM, among other things. The short-sightedness of the execs of course poo-poo'd this, and it never got beyond discussions. (Morons. Said execs managed to nearly kill the company and get it delisted from the NYSE, while Salesforce.com continues to thrive.) Knowing that eventually most computers would be connected from virtually...

There were another two entries on News.com today about Twitter, and I keep asking, who cares? If you're not familiar with the service, it's like short attention span blogging that can blast everyone with text messages with whatever you post. You can do RSS or view on the Web as well. But honestly, so what? I mean, aside from Tyler who posts lots of pictures of himself balancing beverages on his knees and sporting Crocs and shades (;)), who needs this? Not only am I not interested in giving the world a play-by-play every time I take a shit, but I'm even less interested in seeing other people do it. It's like the people who change their status on Facebook ten times a day. I just don't care. It really strikes me as a short-lived tech fad for narcissists...

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