An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys

To: Evan Williams & Biz Stone
RE: Fix it before we nix it

I am a huge fan. You are two good guys. Twitter is the most addictive thing I've experienced since I quit smoking in 1987, and it's so much better for my health. I have built a multinational circle of friends because of Twitter. We care about each other even if many times we have never met.

I could extol your virtues at length. In fact, I often have. As a writer, I love the Twitter story.

Late one night, while an exhausted, enthusiastic team slaves away, one absent founder uses the SMS hack to send a photo link of himself gloating over a glass of wine. That photo spawns an epiphany. The hack is more valuable than the company. They give investors their money back and start over again. Twitter is born. The team shares it with a few friends who share it...you've heard this part before... .

We're up to the part where Twitter goes viral, where growth accelerates, where most users have never met you and many have never even heard of you. We'e at the part where servers are straining and those who do know and like and respect and appreciate what you have done are getting frustrated with crashes and glitches and lost tweets and unexplained weirdities.

You two are on a fast track, moving at a breath taking pace, but you've just come around a sharp turn and discovered you've hit a tough patch of mud. It can slow you down, cause you to slip and fall on your butts or even get you stuck. The patch is more dangerous than you think and it requires your immediate attention.

Social media people are a fickle lot. We are more loyal t each other than we are to the sites we visit. If some of us leave and find somewhere else to hang out there can be unexpected stampedes of friends. The good news, is that will ease the obvious strain on your current system. The bad news is you can very rapidly become yesterday's news

Ev/Biz, people are talking. This last "scheduled maintenance schedule for prime time i your prime market, got moved and when you finally did it, the end result was that things were more of a mess than they were before. Tweeters are talking mostly about Twitter and they are not singing praise. Some folks say you should be bought, bring in adult supervisors to manage things or that maybe a circle of friends should go give Pownce a try. I do know of such a case, but I'll wager that somewhere this week a couple of young entrepreneurs started working on a business plan to replace you.

I hope not. I'm still hopeful and joyful about Twitter. I like it there. I have a wish list a mile long for Twitter, but before I start gushing about that stuff, I need to feel confident that Twitter can walk solidly for a while without limping or stumbling.

Here are just a few ideas, you might want to mull over:

• Fix what's broken. OK, Twitter is a hack built on thin Rails. It was neat for a few dozen people, but you have gone viral and can be potentially huge very quickly. You need to rebuild the whole thing. My technical friends say you should use PHP, not as a patch in a few places, but you need to build the foundation so that it is solid and scalable and you need to do it fast because you have fallen behind. How do you do this in transition? You talk with your userbase.  You keep them informed. You kill yourselves to do what you say you will do.

 

• Reveal monetization plan. If you have it, share it. We users need to understand how it will impact us. Biz, I loved the time we shared in Spain, but it disturbed me when you smiled and said, "there's so many things that we can do." Silicon Valley graveyards are filled with startup corpses, whose founders uttered the same words. My 25 years of consulting companies taught me the #1 cause of death is not lack of financing. Its lack of focus. I have heard so many gushes of what a startup COULD do. The trick is to figure out what you SHOULD do.

• Share your data. Like Facebook, Twitter seems to be a bit squirrelly with its numbers. A little more transparency might help you. It is useful to a great many people to know how many users you have, how often the average Tweeter posts, what the average number of followers a Tweeter has, how many messages a day, geographic distribution, etc. I simply do not understand why you are not willing to share such data. How can sharing it hurt you? Sharing it will allow the crowd to share wisdom with you on what it means.

• Don't sell while broken. You'll suffer the same loss of return that you woud selling a Mercedes with a bashed in fender.

• Start a Twitter blog. You both have decent blogs but you need one that is focused on talking to Twitterville. Hell Evan, you of all people do not need advice on the value of blogging. But there is a need for conversations deeper than 140 characters allows. Share a few aspirations and fears. We are a passionate and knowledgeable community. But neither of you appear to me to be particularly interested in having an ongoing dialogue with customers and that is a bit disappointing from my perspective.

I believe that the two of you have an opportunity of a lifetime and right now you are at a crossroads, one direction puts you on an interactive superhighway and the other will give you an ending like Thelma & Louise.

Sincerely,

ShelIsrael

Comments

[isaac]

Shel, great post. I would like to add "faster International support" though Joi just sign deal with Twitter to expand Japan market.

[Connie Reece]

Shel, I can only say that I hope Ev & Biz listen to your wise counsel. My neighborhood in Twitterville is populated with some amazing people -- and I would never have met them any other way. So we are very, very loyal to Twitter. We tried Jaiku. We tried Pownce. And still go there from time when Twitter is down. But we always come back. Twitter is our home because it's where our "tweeps" (Twitter peeps) are.

But our home is dilapidated and falling down around us. We don't want to flee to the suburbs; we want to stay in Twitterville. Unlike Shel, I don't know what it will take to put the house back in shape; I just know that we cannot keep growing a vibrant community in the online equivalent of a fixer-upper.

[yndygo]

Wow.
That's 100% dead on in my book.

I really hope Ev & Biz not only read it, but take it to heart.

I loathe the prospect of having to 'recreate' my Twitter socnet elsewhere - but there comes a point where that's less of a hassle than putting up with the issues if I remain.

They need to address it before that pinnacle point is reached by too many folks.

Great post Shel. Seconding everything you said.

[Kara Soluri]

Shel, you totally burst my bubble. You mean just as I'm starting to have fun with my 150 or so Twitter friends, the tech Gods might take it away from me? Say it isn't so.

[Tom]

Shel - Great post. These days, I'm evangelizing social media/transparency services to healthcare provider clients - who are surprisingly receptive - only to have them call me and say "It's broke" when it comes to important components like Twitter. Commercial success for Twitter lies beyond the Silicon Valley bubble where bugs, crashes and outages are breakfast conversation starters at Bucks. Keep those open letters coming.

[123]

http://blog.twitter.com/ ?

[Joe Lazarus]

Twitter Blog... check!

http://blog.twitter.com/

I agree with your other points.

[Aruni Gunasegaram]

Very heart felt post. I have come to enjoy twitter very much. I hope they focus and find a way to keep it going. If they get the support of twitter users I'm sure they can do almost anything and several of us would be willing to help them figure it out.

[Sam Lawrence]

Maybe we should talk to them about XMPP. http://tinyurl.com/ystmq9

[Warner Crocker]

Spot on, Shel.

[Kami Huyse]

Twitter is a bit like a rundown tenant, where we all love the homies and try to overlook the rats. It is a powerful community, but right now I wouldn't build an important communication network on its back. It has great promise as a crisis communication platform, but it is hard to rely on something in a crisis that is in its own crisis.

[Kathy Jacobs]

Great post. As usual: Right on target and right on time. I have several things I would like to do with Twitter, but every time one of the extended bouncing ball sessions comes along, I wonder if it will support the load. Twitter could easily be a great help to those who do user support. But if we can't depend on it to deliver the message, it won't work.

Just my two cents!

[Shawn Kirsch]

I would love to go to my blog and talk about this right now, but you nailed it right on the head, I couldn't say it any better.

[Keith Shepard]

Dead nuts on! I hope they read your post and act. Thanks writing what you did and doing it so well.

[Ben Tremblay]

Indulge me as I try to respond in the spirit. ["You" and "y'all" refers to ... heh, the twitmeisters. *snort*]

Earlier this evening I tweeted (c/w "Trick question" warning), "Is software in any sense fractal?"

I was hitting a nail right on the head as hard as I could.
["Social object" bla-yada-blah. *Gack Ptui! And you know where you can shove your cigar!*]

Any fool can pick up a diamond. (Woa up, kidz; this aulde dawg doesn't use sarcasm, and when I feel a need to gore your ox your ox will know it indubitably ... the sophistic can veil the existential, but only the existential leaves blood dripping to the floor.)
Point is: most would not. /Can/ VS /Does/.
"Is" VS "ought". Bodhicitta is foundational, but it's only foundational. "Karma" is about entailments ... it's a noun/verb construct that pertainst to /action/.
(BTW: if someone can get me a Dominican Republic 1st level domain I gotta dandy name for you. W/respect to ma.tt this one has been in the works for a while.)

Lateral: benzene ring ... a principled practitioner pondered the tracings of rain on the window. Eureka? Yaa, shurr. *shrug* I worked 28 years to get my insight. "Eureka" captures it, but it hardly it.

Since I brought him up: kudos to Matt for WP.
And kudos to you for grabbing hold of the chain where it was closest to you.

Me? *shrug* I can always plead age ... or ill-health ... or drunkeness *Alas, unlike the beats, I've the addictive personality but no appetite for addiction!* From time to time I direct this venerable old Toughbook towards a promising vein and do a bit of plumbing. *shrug* What I know is so long as /y'all/ are happy with "80% sufficient 80% of the time for 80% of the time" I'm shit outta luck.

Who knows, maybe if you guyz break through the "sushi for lunch in the ca'" paradigm google has set ... we might keep SpaceShip Earth from augering in. (I've got audio of Columbia's last seconds. Also [lost] audio from Apollo 13. You can't beat principled practioners. Can't. Cannot. Can notRPTnot. All depends where you place mind, is whott.)

~~~ ~~ @ Shel

--bentrem

[Bob]

First off, I would ask kindly that non-developers refrain from hating on Rails. Per Alex Payne, Rails has become such a convenient scapegoat for Twitter miserable uptime. A scalable website goes far beyond a language and framework. Alex doesn't have the background or the skills to build a scalable site, so he blames it on Rails. But seriously, I am sick of hearing non-techie talk about Rails failing to scale when they can't tell me the difference between Ruby and Rails.

[John]

Alex Payne is freaking clueless about scalability, he has all the experience of a new college graduate who wouldn’t know scalability if it bit him in the ass. Saying that all the scalability problem lies with Ruby on Rails is like a blind man holding onto an elephant’s tail and saying that an elephant is a thin wiry spineless animal

[Duane Brown]

Interesting post. We'll have to see if it does anything. I love Twitter,.. and I know it can be better.

[Jasper]

How many startups have to experience crib death before people realize that Rails is a trap - easy to get something up and running but a disaster for scalable deployment.

Remember how iLike scrambled around borrowing all those servers when they went onto Facebook? They have quietly moved out of the Rails ghetto. Time for Twitter to do the same...

[Susan Reynolds]

Without twitter I'd be in contact with about .001% of the amazing people I really do feel that I "know" in a community that is - to me - irreplaceable. That said, my twitter circle includes people like you, Shel's, and being of a certain age and given a certain life perspective I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather have advice from.

I hope Ev and Biz follow through on even some of your wise counsel. Things just wouldn't be the same without the connectivity we've come to look forward to each day, and the friends and opportunities that the twitter birdie dropped into my life at a time when I needed them most.

[Biz Stone]

Shell,thank you for these words. Your concerns reflect Twitter's stated mission: to build a global messaging utility which can be depended on 99.99% of the time.

It's important that you realize the efforts we are making toward this goal are not a quick fix. Twitter made a big move forward when we hired Lee Mighdoll to lead our engineering and operations team. Lee has been working tirelessly to accomplish the simultaneous tasks of bolstering our current infrastructure while seeking genius engineers to build up our tiny team (currently: 4).

We hope that you can have enough patience to see us through the efforts we are currently engaged in to bring solid stability to Twitter. Again, it won't be something that happens with one down-time or one miracle weekend. It will be a sustained effort.

With regard to revealing our monetization plans I can tell you honestly that we are far more focused on growth and reliability in 2008. Our own hunches as well as advice from some very knowledgeable advisors have us adding great ideas to a list of revenue solutions which we will visit in earnest when we are ready.

Sharing data is something we're happy to do. Until now, nobody has asked us "how often the average Tweeter posts" or "what the average number of followers a Tweeter has." Geographic distribution is easy enough to share as well. I'll see if I can dig that stuff up for you next week.

Reporters, analysts, and advertising agencies are very interested in the total number of Twitter users but we have decided not to share that particular statistic. We're happy sharing other data like API traffic or average number of updates but total users is ultimately not an indication of success--especially when you are talking about something as fragile and significant as community.

Finally, you requested that we start a Twitter blog. We blog more at the Twitter blog than our own blogs! If you don't already, I hope you subscribe to the Twitter Blog because I pretty much publish everything I can think of there.

[jesseloop]

Ahem~
I know the people who loaded the computers onto The Shuttle Columbia-and what happened was much more...than…I’m going to discuss when talking about the direction a board would take a specific advanced new media outlet in a specified regional geography-where talent and need are at high standard. (Lockheed Martin, Edwards AFB, Dresden, all within the scope of my passion…trust me.)
shel is a perfect combo of wit and wisdom in that he is simply taking a serious and personal tone to inspire those his remarks are directed to, to engage those involved to heed the actions he has declared are necessary in a capacity to serve-to wit his afformentionable stake and declaration warrant perfectional situation, and thus, so forth and so on…
So there you sit, right where I lost you at, with them fancy kinda words we (albeit in my case somewhat displaced) Midwesterner’s come up with…
Keep seeking what you want to know…c’mon…read more…

when speaking a vocal directive, with honest professionalism, sure, why not. After all, it says so, when it says… “consultant.”

I’d believe it, too. - and I can’t believe any less would be expected in this arena of an area…even though I no longer live on my favorite coasts…did I ever tell you the time I swam at Jones beach one day and at the Rincon the next….ok I won’t tell the rest of it either…I’m just saying…when we spend enough time ‘round these parts to get good at what we’re good at, we ought be listened to when we discuss something, and, if we put forward directives and give actual ways to achieve what we want to see done, which is the step up from simply whining, a la mr. trembley, then we really begin to see something done. Or, in sooo much simpler terms, “just do it.”
Oh wait, “ what did you want done again?”
Yeah…see…and it reminds me of politics-a term I almost know is nearly synonymous with ethical dilemma, greed and despair…say what you’re gonna wanna see and also say how you’re gonna wanna see what you’re gonna wanna see gotten to, get it?
Tudiousity…is his, though. I think I’ve said enough…
~!jesatiu

[rslux]

It's great to see the conversation here, and I hope that some concrete actions back up the strong words.

[Baher]

Looking forward to the statistics that Biz promised us next week.

[shel israel]

My have two special thanks. First to Susan Reynolds. I was worried about what you would say here, because what happened around your misfortune showed this community at its very best. I continue to be moved by what has happened.

My second thanks for the prompt, sincere and informative response by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Biz, I really did not know there was a Twitter Blog. I think we should both be a bit embarrassed by that fact. I have now subscribed and I look forward to hearing from you next week.