Some folks are just never satisfied. Maybe it’s because they’re professional critics who don’t do much else other than voice their opinion for a living, or maybe they’re just cranky people in general, but I’m just sick and tired of people bitching and writing useless articles about Twitter. All this bitching is just noise, data and information pollution, and most importantly… not productive.

I think people are putting a silly amount of weight on this company and it’s service. If anyone builds a component of their business that relies on ANY webservice they don’t control to the point that that service is mission-critical, then they’re optimistic (which is admirable) and an idiot (which is not admirable).

They’re having scaling issues, the end.

Almost every service that I’ve come across in 12 years that didn’t start with some supermegacorp style backing has had scaling issues. People used to just deal with it. Circa 96′-97′ (pre Microsoft) Hotmail used to be (and still is IMO) a super slow piece of garbage, yet people still use it.

If the folks that I see that claim to be so dependent on Twitter that they feel the need to fill Technorati with tons of useless complaint posts, they should either stop bitching and maybe invest in the company, donate money to them, send them pizza, go to work for them to fix things and make things how they want them to be, OR just build another service themselves. They even use someone else’s service for their status blog now themselves.

I’m sorry, but I’m really tired of all of the useless noise about this service being unavailable. If only people were this vocal about stuff that matters more to more people we’d be in a different world. Like a extremely large percentage of personal computers and laptops shipping with a broken & POS operating system. Or Hillary Clinton just generally being an idiot and getting in the way of a candidate who can kick McCain’s ass… anyway, you get the point.

The real point is this…

Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model that user have to “deal” with.
Twitter doesn’t have a sketchy policy regarding the content that is posted through it’s service
Twitter was initially engineered for SMS
Twitter has a decent API that many people have built neat tools and services with, some of which are even useful!
Twitter has changed the way many people communicate with one another… “@” now has two purposes on the web, cool.
Twitter doesn’t edit or censor content that passes through their system. (unless it’s actually damaging or abusive to a specific person… read here and here)
Twitter is I18n friendly.
Twitter is free.

Greetings from Brooklyn, originally uploaded by naterkane.

It’s impossible to not take a postcard shot from a rooftop in DUMBO

I remember when the guys from Cuban Council released Moodstats. It was badass and quite ahead of it’s time. A shockwave app that you could use to track your mood from day to day and share that info with friends who used it as well. That was 2001-3. It was a free download but paid app, required installation, and was primarily marketing to the design geek community of that time. For that reason it wasn’t nearly as successful as it could have been.

Moodstats is an application, a personal diary or journal if you will, that allows you to record & rate how your day has been in several categories. Once you’ve entered sufficient data, Moodstats then begins to generate multi-colored graphs & statistics showing you exactly how your moods have been lately.

One of the things I found about my relationship with Moodstats, was it was an unnatural activity for me to document anything outside of work consistently, let alone how I happen to feel each and every day. I never kept a journal as a kid, so though I loved the idea, it was difficult for me to adopt it into my routine. Their site still lists them as having just 1426 users. A total shame.

I’m being sentimental, I know.

Documenting your mood, by proxy

These days we don’t need to manually enter how we feel for the purpose of tracking our mood, anyone who uses Twitter is already doing that, even if they don’t realize it.

The folks over at Summize have built Sentiment, and I just wrote about it being used by Get Satisfaction to pull in commentary from twitter related to companies, products, services, etc. They take 5 different word lists, rate them from great to wretched. Posts that don’t express sentiment are labeled as such and (I’m assuming) ignored.

We use our search engine to find up-to-the-second tweets about this topic, then automatically analyze the attitudes expressed in those tweets.

So I thought I could probably use this to see what the sentiment is for my name, @naterkane… aka my mood. Though it’s very possible for there to be skewed data for a user who receives a large number of @ messages, that isn’t the case for me. What’s my mood been like you ask? According to Summize, it’s “bad”. I can’t really argue with that, and fortunately, there’s always tomorrow to turn my mood around. :-)

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I’ve been playing with Summize for a bit now. Their super-fast queries are just really gratifying. I’m also a fan of Get Satisfaction (and trying to get satisfaction in life in general as well), though my relationship with GS is much more recent. Yesterday I found an article that showed me something pretty cool that GS is doing. They call it Overheard.

What is Overheard?

Overheard is a new feature of Get Satisfaction that bridges the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction’s support network. Overheard lists recent Twitter posts (“tweets”) related to a company and allows any user, employee, or customer to convert a selected tweet into a rich, searchable Get Satisfaction topic.

When somebody replies to a tweet via Overheard, Get Satisfaction sends a reply to that person to let them know a conversation was started in response to their issue.

So now, whenever you post something on Twitter about a company, brand, service or product that’s been added to Get Satisfaction, you’re indirectly adding content to Get Satisfaction. It’s similar to when users of Facebook would accidentally add content to their profiles with Beacon, but not so creepy.

The Backstory

What can I say that no one else has said before? Deliberately having avoided Vista like the plague for the past year, I’ve continued to hack at one project after another with my “trusty” 17″ HP laptop. When i purchased this puppy a year and a half ago, it was a purchase out of necessity. I was commuting 2.5 hours each way every day from my home in upstate new york to my office, which at the time, was in manhattan. The work days were long, very long, and since I was finding myself taking work home with me almost every night and weekend, I needed a portable solution. Long story short, I bought the HP because I couldn’t afford the (twice as expensive and seemingly comparable, non-intel) macbook at the time. The HP came with XP Media Center edition, which was basically just a few bundled apps that I never planned on using, and a glossy look to the task bar and window chrome, whatever.

When I brought the box home I was surprised to find out that despite the fact that this was a brand-new-in-box laptop, there were not any installation cds or dvds that came in the box. I flipped through the “getting started” manual, which came in the form of a semi-large two sided poster, to find out that on one of the two hard drives there was a partition for software recovery. And why did they do this? I can only guess to prevent this fancy Media Center edition from being distributed. And when contacted HP about having them send me an XP Media Center disk, they said none were available, and this version of XP I had was only available as an OEM install… aka: disks didn’t exist. The searching I did for a box copy at the time reinforced what they told me. So here I was, pseudo-proud owner of a brand new laptop, with no way to re-install the OS that it came with (and I had paid for) without completely setting it back to showroom fresh and wiping all my data.

From then till now

Some time during the first few months I suddenly lost my ability to access the “Add/Remove Programs” app, and kept getting a Run DLL as an app error that forced me to close the window. Googling provided no solutions, so I grabbed myself a copy of Cleanse Uninstaller, an ugly but effective app that let me get rid of anything I no longer wanted. Stuff like Adobe CS2, random betas of browsers, all of those really stupid bundled applications, etc.

Next to quit on me was the slick little media buttons above my keyboard, which I now know can be fixed by unplugging the power supply, removing the battery, and holding the power button down for a couple seconds to expend all of the electricity in the chipset. Ok cool, sure, no problem.

Then print-screen started taking these awesome 2 color screenshots that were incredibly lovely large images of all black with a sprinkling of white in there so you know it was doing something. Then the heat-sync got clogged with dust (pics of the rebuild here), etc, etc, etc. You get the point.

A new beginning?

With the news of XP Service Pack 3 hitting the streets, I was hoping that many of the stupid little things that just make my time spent on this laptop less than enjoyable could now be corrected. But… I stand corrected and end this post, typing on the trusty OSX machine that sits under my desk, with the following screenshot.