Does this ad terrify anyone else? The first few times I saw it it really disturbed me. IT LOOKS LIKE THAT FIRST GUY IS GONNA SMASH HIS HEAD!
I’ll be brief.
Twitter‘s spotty performance used to be an irritating blemish on an otherwise lovely (if relatively lightweight) service. But after months of irregular but frequent downtime (including two separate incidents of a broken site just today), it has become the site’s defining characteristic. People are patient with a cute startup’s growing pains, but Twitter has, in theory, been working on scaling up for quite a few months now–and things are only getting worse.
It reminds me of Friendster’s notorious slow performance, and at this point I suspect it presages much the same fate–a reversal in public opinion, leading to a competitor eclipsing it right when it’s about to start making money. Of course, I still don’t see “microblogging” as anything but a loss leader component of a bigger social networking system (read: Facebook), but that’s another story, and it doesn’t help Twitter fix its technical problems, anyway.
May 212008
I just got an RSS notification that my Muxtape had been updated. I thought this was strange, since I hadn’t, you know, updated it. So I went to look at it and, lo and behold, my playlist now comprises “Aim (with Stephen Jones) – Good Disease [Babybird does a Prince thing]” eight times in a row. All the songs I had actually uploaded have disapparated. This is strange, obviously, but I did a little more digging by clicking on a bunch of random featured muxtapes on the main site page–what do you know? They’re ALL the same.
I logged in and tried to delete the songs from my playlist, but just got an error message. So it’s not just a weird caching problem, or an odd programming error–clearly there’s something in the system setting these lists and keeping them that way.
So what’s going on here? My guess is someone figured out an exploit and performed what is indisputably a goofy, harmless hack. But there’s always the slight delicious chance that the entire site was created for this purpose–to garner a large use base, get them used to the interface and hooked on the service, and then take advantage of it by spamming everybody with some unknown band’s latest piece of crap single.
Unfortunately, that is almost certainly not true, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were?
Incidentally, I haven’t actually bothered to listen to the song yet (amazon.co.uk review here–you’re welcome, Aim). But if it happens to be any good, I’m pretty sure we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the next day or two.
Update: Yep, Muxtape is saying they got hacked. Bummer.
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