The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining
If there isn’t one already, a group that must be created on Facebook is the “Twitter Bellyachers”. The service goes down, and there’s instantly waves of moaning and groaning as if the world had stopped spinning on its axis.
People, we’re talking about a free service that, for the most part, is all about entertainment, vanity and killing time. As much as I enjoy using Twitter, it’s far from being a mission critical or important online service.
Life goes on whether Twitter is up or down. When it’s down, you can do something else like clean out your in-box or amuse yourself with StumbleUpon. Or, if you’re desperate for a mini-communication fix sign up for Pownce, which just added a bunch of new features, including an increase in the size of files you can send to 100MB from 10MB.
The hand-wringing over Twitter’s technical troubles are really part and parcel of a more widespread phenomena: the enthusiastic groaning and griping that happens when a free online service fails to meet expectations - aka the Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining.
It’s bad enough no one wants to pay for anything, but the expectations placed on free services to deliver 99.99999% reliability are astounding. Come on, what do you expect for nothing?
Still, kvetching about popular services such as Twitter, Skype or Facebook when they have technical hiccups has become a popular game. When it happens, everyone wants to get into the action by complaining, criticizing, attacking and pontificating. The best one recently was Webware’s Rafe Needleman suggesting Twitter should close until its technical issues are resolved.
Ha!
For some more rational thought on the warped sense of free these days, check out broadstuff, who succinctly pointed out that:
“There is this weird idea in the air that if something is free to user it is free to produce, and thus must still reach all those other norms we take for granted in paid-for services, like reliability, privacy etc.”
More: If you’re looking for some good news, tune in to Apple’s developer’s conference tomorrow where Twitter’s Biz Stone says “there’s going to be some very interesting breaking-news happening on Twitter.
Update: It turns out that the big announcement is Twitter partnering with Summize to all Twitters containing the words “wwdc,” “apple,” “iphone” or “steve jobs”. One word: underwhelming. One thought: I hope this news doesn’t break Twitter during the developer’s conference. Then again, it would be funny to see. If Twitter does goes down, Mike Arrington offers up a couple of options to meet your Twitter fix.
June 8th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Mark,
I was one of the whiners. Twitter’s outages were reducing the utility of the service. A bit like talking to someone on the other side of the table who keeps getting up and walking away to do other things.
But Twitter got smart. They added a simple hyperlink at the top of the screen to “check out Twitter Status for ongoing updates about the service.” By clicking on that I can find the explanation for what is going on and what Twitter is doing about it. And that’s made the outages a lot easier for me to handle. It tells me they’re working toward a solution and let’s me know there’s hope for better times ahead. That’s enough to keep me using the service (which is really quite useful for connecting with my online community). And it reduces my need to bleat.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:09 am
[...] — davidjhinson @ 12:09 pm Tags: Twitter, Twitter.com Every time I read a post like this I think “I guess that person doesn’t mind having his time [...]
June 8th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Joseph,
If a hyperlink was all it took to subdue the Twitter-ati, that would be amazing. I think peoples’ expectations for Twitter and other free services are so high, that nothing less than near-perfect service is acceptable.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Mark,
Sometimes I wonder if twitter outages (and outages on other free Web 2.0 services) are a part of that service’s overall marketing strategy. I’m kidding of course, but those ongoing outages sure get everyone talking and Dave Delaney (@davedelaney on twitter) has even designed some clothing to express his experience (currently available at: http://www.cafepress.com/davemadethat).
June 8th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
a succinct and spot on posting.
a number of people want to have things for free, screw the pay aspect. if music isn’t free, let’s bitch and then take it. if twitter goes down, let’s bitch.
and yeah, i know that some claim that they’re willing to pay. let’s see over the course of time if this pans out.
but as you suggest, twitter is really a way for those who are on the bleeding edge, or at least trying to act like they are, to do a mental masturbation for the rest of the world.
you hit the nail on the head as far as i can tell. twitter does appear to be an app to waste time on for the vast majority of most users.
peace
June 8th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
The complaining that I actually learn something from is that done by geeks who question the structure of a service that fails to scale or exposes the weakness of a technology. I’ve learned a fair amount about Ruby on Rails from those who used to promote it as the next great architecture only to find in practice that it falls short in certain applications. When people suggest alternatives I learn more.
Whiners can be tedious with their unrealistic expectations, but they can also be educational as they speculate what went wrong and how to fix it.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Perfection! Everyone talks about how crucial Twitter has become so obviously they will be willing to pay for it… right? (crickets) Companies building their apps on unstable APIs/platforms are asking for it. Twitter magnifies the knee-jerk reaction that blogs have cultivated. Twitter is fun and free and cool. I think you’re spot on about the community around it - that is what can be bought/sold is all these little interactions and connections.
June 8th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Yea, I lasted about two weeks as one of the whiners before I declared a man up http://julianbaldwin.com/blog/2008/05/24/nobody-dies-on-my-watch-friendfeed-and-twitter-will-both-survive/
Not spam! Just reinforcing your point for any readers in the driver seat of whinehicle.
June 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I agree with *most* of what you guys are saying. The only reason I believe that there is some merit in the whiners and in fact you want the winers is because they are the ones who will challege your product/service and use it in ways that no one else will, which will eventually lead you to estabishing and refining your business model. Mathew Ingram had a really good article http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/06/04/the-early-internet-no-business-model/ on the lack of or fluidity of business models for tech company in the early days. Flushing this out and driving the business forward is invaluable and these “whiners” do play a significant role in validating and bending what you will do and become.
-CFOMarshall
June 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Paul,
Constructive whining can be a good thing if it causes a service provider to fix things or re-think how the service works and the features it includes. It’s when it’s whining for the sake of whining that’s difficult to swallow.
June 8th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Agreed Mark, there is a difference between those who are frustrated and “whining” because they are trying to use your service for something you hadn’t contemplated and those who just have nothing to do but complain!
June 9th, 2008 at 2:31 am
[...] Evans brings the point to the surface in his post The Wonderful Word of Web 2.0 Whining where he writes about the way that people complain about Twitter’s now famous up-time and [...]
June 9th, 2008 at 9:32 am
[...] The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining | Mark Evans “It’s bad enough no one wants to pay for anything, but the expectations placed on free services to deliver 99.99999% reliability are astounding. Come on, what do you expect for nothing?” (tags: twitter web2.0) [...]
June 9th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Twitter encourages people to use it for more than just vanity and time killing. They open up their API for developers to create third party apps and for other web services to integrate. Let’s not forget the Twitter evangelists out there who hype the service and arm twist others into using it.
While all of this is going on Twitter continues to build on a framework that cannot support the efforts that will be needed to scale up to meet the incoming flood of new users.
Then they blame those users for causing their problems.
If there’s a better recipe for creating en-masse bitching I’m not aware of it.