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Apple Fans Give Twitter Indigestion

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:07:53 +0000

Sometimes love is so powerful it can take out a server or two. Today, as the Mac faithful gathered in San Francisco for the Apple event today, they tweeted CEO Steve Jobs’ appearance, the new product announcements, and their overall rapture, causing Twitter to stagger during the hours of 10 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. PDT, according to data from web performance firm AlertSite. Apple and Jobs were No. 1 and No. 2 in trending topics on the site, and AlertSite saw Twitter’s performance degrade to 90 percent as twitterpated fanboys turned to microblogging as an outlet for their joy. Below is the graph showing the degradation of Twitter’s availability during the event.

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Oprah Is Keeping Twitter Hot

Om Malik — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:02:07 +0000

Twitter Founder Ev Williams went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to talk about his San Francisco-based micro-messaging startup, and in the process turned his red hot company hotter. It’s not clear how many people are going to sign up for the service following the broadcast of Oprah’s show (and her subsequent twittering), but one thing is for sure: It was going to test Twitter’s infrastructure. And so far, Twitter has passed with flying colors. As Rich Greenfield, analyst with Pali Capital wrote this morning: “Oprah is more of a ‘movement’ than a TV personality or entertainer (and the movement is called ‘Live Your Best Life’). Consumers across the world listen and absorb whatever Oprah does/says and today she has begun to Twitter.”

According to web site traffic monitoring service AlertSite, so far the Oprah bump hasn’t brought down Twitter’s web site, even though there was a significant increase in the response time for the site. Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer of AlertSite said: “Twitter didn’t behave any different because the Big O showed up and Twitter was holding up better today than earlier this month.” In other words, Twitter prepared well for the big event.

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Burned By Gmail Outage? Google Will (Almost) Buy You a Postage Stamp

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:52:17 +0000

Updated: Folks, if you were burned by last night’s Gmail outage and pay for your service, don’t despair, Google has a service-level agreement in place to atone for the loss of productivity. The downside is that atonement comes in the form of a 3-day credit for service that’s worth about 41 cents. Update: But don’t worry, Google is feeling generous, and will offer you the maximum 15-day credit.

Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at web site performance monitoring firm AlertSite, notes that Google offers paid users a credit should the site experience below 99.9 percent availability each month. From Godskind’s email:

Assuming the reports about today’s outage of 2.5 hrs are true that would put Feb uptime at ~ 99.6%. This is a breach of Google’s SLA and the penalty is 3 days of service credit.

Google charges $50 annually for each license, which means that the credit for the 2.5 hours of downtime equals out to about 41 cents per employee. That’s not enough to buy you a postage stamp. Because most people would scoff at such an offer, Google has extended it to a 15-day credit worth a more reasonable $2.05. Normally, the credit’s not enough to buy a postage stamp, but now you can get a value meal or two. However, for those who want to claim their credit, Godskind notes that you have to let Google know within 30 days.

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12seconds.tv Brings Video Recording to the iPhone…Sort Of

Weldon Dodd — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:12 +0000

12seconds.tv has just launched a new iPhone app ($0.99) in the App Store that allows you to output video files from your iPhone and share them with your friends on the web. It’s just not the video that you had in mind. This clever little app lets you take three photos, or pick them from your photo library, and then add a voice note over a nicely animated slideshow, complete with Ken Burns effects.

The name of the service comes from the maximum length of any video, just 12 seconds, no more (and no less either, at least from the iPhone app). The videos are uploaded to the 12seconds.tv community site where you and your friends can view them, link to them, or embed them in a web page.

The 12seconds iPhone app has a very different feel from staring into a webcam. The ability to select the photos and have some control over the composition of the video before recording the audio creates some distance between the author and the video. The result is something that still feels intimate and personal, but has a stronger sense of telling a story, even in 12 seconds, than you might get from talking into the camera.

Here’s a quick video demonstration from Sol Lipman of 12seconds.tv.

What’s Good?

The whole process is fairly simple and relatively painless. To select your pics, you can take snaps right in the app, but I think most people will prefer to take pictures with the built-in camera app and then switch to the 12seconds app to select the existing pics from the camera roll. After you’ve selected your pictures you can record audio to go with the animated slidshow.

You can sign up for an account on the 12seconds.tv community site from within the app, but most of the settings and configuration is done on the web page. You can link your Twitter account to your 12seconds.tv profile so you can automatically send out a tweet when you add a new video.

What’s Less Than Good?

One frustration is that there is no “undo” for any of the steps in creating your 12 second video. If you select the wrong picture, you have to press “back” and start over. If you mess up your audio note, you have to start over. And starting over here means from the beginning.

Because the app is tied so closely to the 12seconds.tv website, it does not work at all if the web page is down or if the iPhone is in Airplane Mode. You can take pics with the camera and save them in the camera roll, but you’ll have to select your three images and record your audio when you are in range of a network connection, preferably 3G or Wi-Fi. Edge is just too slow to upload video reliably.

Video Twitter?

The 140 character limit makes Twitter more accessible and certainly less intimidating than writing a full blog post when you want to just share a random thought, witticism, link, or just complain. The constraints of 3 pictures and 12 seconds will have a similar effect for video micro-blogging. It’s enough to share a moment, but not so much that you actually have to script anything out. Of course, what makes Twitter popular is that there are 6 million or so other people throwing their voice into the wind, and some are paying attention to you. The future success of 12seconds is going to depend on how quickly the rest of the world picks up on the idea of sharing 12 second videos.

Is It Worth It?

12seconds.tv is not the video recording experience that we were hoping for, but I actually think that the unique constraints of three images and 12 seconds is interesting in itself. If you are out and take a few snaps with the iPhone camera, you could post a link and comment on Twitter, or you could actually talk about what’s happening and convey a lot more with your own voice. I think the possibilities are worth looking into. Of course, the real trick to see if I keep my interest in 12seconds.tv is if my friends adopt it and I stay engaged.

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Flash Exploit Shows the Dark Side of Web 2.0

Stacey Higginbotham & Alistair Croll — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:00:30 +0000

Update: As pointed out in the comments below, Symantec has since clarified their original worries about this being a zero-day exploit affecting current versions of Flash. However it still remains a problem affecting earlier versions of Flash. For details about the specific issue, see Adobe’s post on the problem.

Yesterday’s news of an exploit in Flash that gives hackers the ability to redirect a web site’s visitors to malware-laden servers highlights one of the biggest dangers and problems around the interactive web. Allowing third-party programs — such as Flash, mashups, widgets, or even specialized programs for activities such as bill payments — to run in web sites introduces vulnerabilities and performance troubles that are outside the web site owner’s control.

The Flash exploit is noteworthy because people take Flash for granted, the way they do JPEG and GIF images. So they are willing to let third-party content providers such as video sites or advertisers insert Flash into pages. The problem with this is that Flash is much more than an image or video; it’s a powerful programming language. And as a result, it’s vulnerable.

Mashed-up sites are becoming commonplace. Bloggers and site designers grab snippets of code, inserting them within tags in a page, and build a mashup. But it’s often unclear what they’re inserting. For example, recently-launched Apture shows relevant content when users mouse over a link, but they can also insert advertising.

Such third-party applications also slow down the performance of a web site, leading to irritated users and site owners who have less control over a site’s reliability and the overall user experience. This opens up opportunities for companies such as Gomez, AlertSite and Keynote Systems which provide different types of performance monitoring from a user perspective.

The allure of a component Internet is strong. By assembling widgets, Flash elements and third-party plug-ins, developers can quickly build dynamic applications. But unless they know everything that could be injected into their pages, they’re running a significant risk by doing so.

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