Ryan A Graves.com

Adjix is a new company that acts just like TinyURL by shortening web site addresses making them perfect for Twitter. But, Adjix adds a little banner ad at the top of the site that you visit via their link. If you own the account that shortened the Adjix URL then you get a cut.  You can collect $0.10 for  every 1000 unique views and $0.20 for each valid, unique, click-through. I know this is tough for the 200 follower crowd like me but for the Twitter “Big Guns” who link a ton this could become quite profitable.

If you’d like to help out with my small account I recently start click on this link http://adjix.com/sf to come right back to this page!

I was at dinner last week with a group of up and coming, creative, start-up-ish people and one of them asked me, “do you work or do you just Twitter?” At first I went on the defensive and thought, well of course I work. I work 10+ hours a day and I do damn good job! Then I took a moment and thought about my Twittering…I realized that I do Twitter a lot. Twittering is short and 140 characters takes about 6 seconds to type. So, I may Twitter once an hour but I don’t think that makes me unproductive. I don’t take smoke breaks or excessive coffee breaks, I take 6-15 second Twitter breaks.

I looked back through my “tweets” that day and wondered what she was talking about. I know that I Twitter a decent amount but what exactly does that look like to my near 200 followers? Well, that weekend/week I met with the CTO of GE Healthcare, which was awesome, I went to the Chicago Air and Water Festival, I road a scooter around downtown Chicago, I went out to a happy hour and watched the Olympics, I spent time with my girlfriend, and I went a neighborhood festival. Without trying to brag at all, I realized that my life was pretty exciting…at least on Twitter.

The thing about Twitter is that if used correctly it can make a person “look” pretty damn exciting. I’m not a huge fan of tweets like, “going to bed” or “just ate some rice”. I don’t want to read that that type of tweet, it’s a waste of my time, so I don’t post that type of tweet. I try and tweet the more exciting things in my life. I’ll share if I’m going to watch a movie or go on a trip or head to a bar or even work on a certain project but I find those things exciting and productive and worth sharing. That is the type of thing I’d like to read about someone else, so that is what I share. My tweets hide some of the more boring things in my life and highlight the more exciting events.

So when reading the tweets of other I always keep in mind that Twitter highlights the exciting and hides the boring. Not many people tweet about doing payroll but a lot of people tweet about closing the big deal or their latest vacation. Take Twitter with a grain of salt, it definitely makes me more exciting!

So I know I’m fairly late to try out 12seconds.tv but I’ll blame that on my love appreciation for Seesmic. I have friends on Seesmic, some that I’ve met their and some that I’ve met in “real life”. Never the less a new “video twitter” social software is out called 12seconds.tv. As you may have guest (cause you’re a damn genius) the videos that you can post are capped at 12 seconds. Similar to Twitter’s 140 character limit 12seconds.tv limits your content.

Some people argue that this will improve one’s ability to scan many videos quickly making it more “checkable” and some argue that the content you can post in 12 seconds is bound to be terrible and thus not worth “checking” in the first place. Either way that is not what has attracted me to 12seconds.tv.  What has made me begin to use 12seconds.tv is that you can email in 12 second video to a custom to your account URL and they will automatically post to your account. Cool, right? Right. The reason that this is so cool is because most any cell phone now can take video and most any cell phone can send email and 1+1=2 right. So video + email = practically live videos directly to the web!

I’ve become a huge fan of video on the web. I have have my video posts with Ryan G TV, I very regularly use Seesmic, and I religiously use Twitter, and now I have short video’s from my mobile phone with 12seconds.tv.

Loic as soon as you guys at Seesmic give me the ability to send in vids from my mobile I’ll drop 12seconds.tv because honestly I don’t like the time limit. But for now this is easy and its accessible to the masses and that is what will make any web app work!

See widget to the right! ———————————>

Today when Amazon had there little S3 hick-up, the pictures/avatars in Twhirl (my Twitter app of choice) wouldn’t show up. I realized that my experience using Twitter was significantly worse without the picture and I realized that the picture that shows up next to the 140 character message is significantly important.

In the olden days when people would constantly check away messages on AIM the messages were fairly impersonal. Those away message were just left for whoever cared to view it. You had to actually go into each persons away message in order to view it. With Twitter the message comes to you, there is much more of the feeling that the person wrote that tweet ‘for me to see’ versus ‘for people to see’.

Now after using Twitter for a while I now know the people I follow by their avatars and I realized that this avatar makes the tool (Twitter) so much more personal. This personal aspect of Twitter makes the messages worth checking.  This is one reason why Twitter works so well, its personal.

Lesson: Keep it personal.

Here is just another great use of Twitter. I’ve used it here to review and remember what I was thinking at certain moments on my trip. Also, I used my Twitter stream to look back over my photos and recap certain captions. As soon as I get a good grasp of my pics I’ll post them too.  Thanks Twitter (by the way Twitter has been fairly reliable for me recently, weird!).

Most recent on top (in typical Twitter format):

finally home in milwaukee, long day of travel. but I met some great people and read a lot! finished @sethgodin ’s “purple cow”, awesome read about 5 minutes ago from web

less than 20 seconds ago from BeTwittered
On the plane first class out of kc reading @garyvee ’s book and finally on the way to mke… long day of travel. about 4 hours ago from txt

Missed my flight out of kc by seconds due to the delay out of laguardia, felt like home alone running through the airport. haha. Now i wait! about 4 hours ago from txt

i wish i was in chi hangin with @mollstar not on this sardine can of an airplane. about 8 hours ago from web

That was a great trip with great friends! Check out breif summary http://ryanagraves.com/blog/ much more pics coming soon! about 9 hours ago from web

@digidave thanks for the support bud delays blow but missed flight are worse hope for neither about 9 hours ago from web in reply to Digidave

Just found out that we are on the tarmac and indefinitely delayed… about 9 hours ago from txt

On the plane, delayed. Ugh. about 9 hours ago from txt

Cant get onto twitter via my non-smart phone samsung. Really bothersome! about 11 hours ago from txt

Reading purple cow by seth godin at lga, waiting for my 2pm flight. about 11 hours ago from txt

Heading for LGA…great time in nyc. about 13 hours ago from txt

Cigars with Tommy and Chen at Columbia…mmmmm 12:09 AM June 22, 2008 from txt

Peking duck house in chinatown, nyc for dinner. 08:11 PM June 21, 2008 from txt

Telling friends about @garyvee and winelibrarytv… 07:18 PM June 21, 2008 from txt

Waking up late in back bay, boston reading the wsj… 09:29 AM June 21, 2008 from txt

From my blog: This weekends trip.: Hello all, As you are reading this I’m on vacati.. http://tinyurl.com/6mklx7 03:32 AM June 21, 2008 from twitterfeed

From my blog: Reblog this nerds!: This video is a hilarious spoof on Tumblr (micro-bloggi.. http://tinyurl.com/64ythj 03:31 AM June 21, 2008 from twitterfeed

Tiger woods golf…in boston at handcocks…back bay! 02:45 AM June 21, 2008 from txt

Rockin solas in boston. 11:56 PM June 20, 2008 from txt

Right field at the red sox game, livin the dream! 09:11 PM June 20, 2008 from txt

New haven, conn looking for food. Let me know where I should eat. 12:05 PM June 20, 2008 from txt
In westport conn loking for a mcd’s   11:06 AM June 20, 2008  from txt

We just had to pull over for tommy to yak…good trip to boston! 11:03 AM June 20, 2008 from txt

Heading out in east village NYC for the night with the fellas…reducing the amt of twitter for fear of my behavior…should be fun 09:21 PM June 19, 2008 from txt

Johnny Damon just talked shit to us when the ball when ground rule double to the fans, he is awesome. 04:08 PM June 19, 2008 from txt

3rd baseline at Yankee stadium is awesome 02:46 PM June 19, 2008 from txt

@sprenkler…no man i’m in nyc this weekend. B Samic might, sorry. 01:02 PM June 19, 2008 from txt

No comp for 4 days…ill be heavy on the twitter streams, then a blog post of all my tweets of the weekend on http://ryanagraves.com/blo … … 04:25 PM June 18, 2008 from txt

Flight out of mke delayed. leaving at 5:45. 04:15 PM June 18, 2008 from txt

heading to the airport and off to NYC!!! 03:08 PM June 18, 2008 from BeTwittered

Let me introduce you to James Karl Buck. He is the guy that was released from a Mahalla jail after sending a one-word tweet from his cell phone to Twitter. The message of “Arrested” alerted all of his followers on the site of his detention.

The message caused his college to hire a lawyer for him that lead to his release! However, a translator that was with him Mohammed Maree was not released and now James has made it his goal to get Mohammed out of jail. This is the CNN report of what happened:

The two were at a protest April 7, when families demanding the government’s help began throwing Molotov cocktails and setting tires on fire, Buck said.

Buck said that as he and Maree fled, they were stopped by police and detained, along with several journalists and bloggers who were covering the protest.

Both men were released hours later, but detained again shortly after leaving the detention facility.

That’s when Buck and Maree were separated — Buck was released, and his translator was moved to another police station. Now, attorneys say Maree still hasn’t been charged and remains in prison.

Back in the United States, Buck has taken it upon himself to further capitalize on the power of his Twitter network, which is now more than 570 followers strong, to help free his translator and friend.

Fueled by the gnawing guilt of leaving Maree behind, Buck set out to enlist all of the help he could in hopes of sparking a movement for his release.

He began setting up a virtual online command post to demand Maree’s release. He used everything from Twitter updates, blog posts on his own Web site to an electronic petition signed by more than 900 people.

This is the most dramatic example of how Twitter has effected someones life that I’ve found. Pretty phenomenal story about the uses and far stretching effects of social software.

Buck said this about social software and its effects, “What this shows us is that we the people can harness an incredible power against oppressors by simply communicating with each other,” Buck said. “It shows the power in unity through technology.”

In the midst of Twitter’s ever so obvious struggles it was only a matter of time before competition entered the market. With the growth that Twitter has experienced (doubling in March/April 08) it was obvious that there were going to be copy cats.

Plurk is the only site that I’ve seen that is getting ‘tons’ of hype on the internet (outside of Pownce). So much so that Loic Lemeur, Kevin Rose and other big names are going there early just to reserve their name in case Plurk blows up. Scoble tried to get Scobleizer and somebody snaked it! Damn user name squatters. Loic Lemeur even suggested a business that gets your user name on all the new start-ups for you. Luckily I got ‘ryangraves‘.

Plurk has the really simple and intuitive design of a timeline actually laid out horizontally, unlike Twitters thread style. Another cool thing they have built in is what they call  ‘Karma’. A user develops Karma by using Plurk more and more and I think by adding friends. As Twitter continues to struggle with there infrastructure people will undoubtedly try new tools. Plurk just might be the one they go to. So far it doesn’t look like Plurk integrates with Twitter but that might be a way for the Plurk folks to make the transition even more enticing.

This is, yes, another post on Twitter. There are a few things I have read, thought, or have been released since the last post that should be shared. First, the Twitter folks publicly admit they don’t know what the issues are. Isn’t that something that they should have identified by now? Haven’t these issues happened repeatedly? Like I said in another post, I’m relatively new to Twitter so I don’t want to be to critical but it seems they should know by now what is up.

Driving to work this morning my roommate and I were discussing a possible infrastructure that would support the scalability that Twitter so desperately needs. Then today I read a very interesting blog post with a similar solution to Twitters problems. The post is called “A Detailed Five Step Twitter Scaling Plan” posted by Hank Williams. I really like the simplicity of his diagram in his proposed solution.  I don’t want to just repeat his post here but I encourage you to read it.

This is Hank’s simple infrastructure diagram:

His five steps to solve Twitters problems are…

1. Automated CPU provisioning
You really *do* need the ability to provision resources more or less on demand.
2. Denormalization
Every user’s outbound tweets should be stored in a separate database from their inbound tweets
3. Sharding
In the above diagram you see that we have separated users into clusters.
4. Shard Splitting
In the real world each database should continue to grow until it starts to be over burdened. Then you “split the shard” into two databases.
5. Distributed User Lookup
Storing a lookup table for each user that indicates where their inbound and outbound data servers are.

This plan to fix Twitter seems very simple to me. It would be cool if we could get a conversation going in the comments around what other infrastructure solutions people think are viable for Twitter. Also, why do you think the are experiencing so many problems? Let us know.

I got this picture when I tried to login to Twitter this morning…

I was late to join the cult that has become Twitter. At first I thought it was useless. I had a blog already and didn’t need to shrink my blogging. Turns out microblogging is very popular and very useful! It is quickly becoming recognized as one of the best networking tools of the Web 2.0 era. However, they have some issues…namely, it goes down all the time. People love to jump on the “Twitter sucks” train but I’m not here to do that and although this post is pointing out some of the struggles Twitter is having, I’ve still not jumped on that train. I still support you Evan Williams…but don’t test me.

Instead of diving into a bitch session about Twitter being down I’d like to post an excerpt from Twitters blog then comment on it a bit. Excerpt below:

“…We hit some scaling stumbling blocks a few months back, but not because Ruby or Rails was working against us. Once Twitter reached a certain amount of traffic we were forced to rethink our architecture; you don’t build a messaging system the same way you build a content management system. We set about developing custom solutions both inside and outside our Rails application. We also made good use of web scaling standbys: caching, database optimization, more hardware, and shared experience. Throughout this scramble to scale, Ruby and Rails were assets for their speed of development and creative, helpful communities.

For stressed engineers, it’s tempting to think that another solution - anything but what you’re using now! - will solve all your problems. Maybe you start dreaming up the perfect framework on a white board, or maybe you start scouring the web for the fastest, newest, most experimental technology. In the long run, picking a foundation you’re comfortable with and making sensible iterations towards your performance goals will yield a bigger win. You have to be careful while iterating: watch your database, test thoroughly, and be ready to roll back when things break (and they will)…” (to full post)

In the first paragraph they basically get on their hands and knees begging us to have faith in Ruby on Rails. However, at this point I still haven’t heard anyone say for sure that Rails does not have a scaling issue. This post went up in June 07 and still today May 19, 2008 Twitter is having scaling issues.

To the second paragraph, I only have a suggestion: Start considering both options. Going to the white board is pretty drastic I know,  but Twitter will only survive with sufficient scalability, right? I love Twitter, it’s an awesome tool but can it be sold if it doesn’t prove itself to be a sustainable product? Maybe an infrastructure redesign is exactly what the “hacker” ordered.

Either way, I hope they figure it out. The recent outage of Seesmic’s alpha release caused an uproar and I don’t see ‘alpha’ or ‘beta’ anywhere on Twitters site anywhere. I don’t need 140 words for Twitter, I only have 2, “Come on”.