Something must have told the Twitvid team that this is a logical direction to take Twitvid but I don’t see it. Broad category social networks have, more or less, been done and will, more than likely, stay the same as they are now for a long time. The best way to compete in social networking is by creating niche communities. Broad category video sharing is simply not niche enough to cut out a following.

Twitvid was and should have been a utility for sharing videos via Twitter since Twitter doesn’t currently allow that. I’m sure Twitter Photos, which all but negated the need for Twitpic and others, scared Twitvid into this pivot. But what would have been even more sensible is to, like Photobucket, make a deal with Twitter to handle their official service in an unobtrusively and mutually beneficial way.

Millions have used Twitvid and I’m sure many will continue to. However, I’ll go on record as saying that not many of those people will use these new features on Twitvid. I think this move sounds the death knell for Twitvid.

For years I’ve been following the speculations thrown-out by industry pundits in order to formulate my own opinion of what’s to come at Apple’s next event. This year is no different as I’m tuned in with my ear-to-the-ground and my finger-in-the-air about what is to come at WWDC. I’m really very, very excited about Monday’s event. Moreso than I’ve been for a WWDC in a few years.

But I may choose to back away a little from all of this speculation because the phrasing of various bloggers is getting a bit out of control and it ends up in me being misinformed rather than informed.

Let me explain. When someone is riffing on what Apple’s upcoming, already announced, iCloud service will be it is OK to write posts like “What I think iCloud will be?” or “Based on the current information, iCloud could very well be”. But, that isn’t what is happening. The expectation for what iCloud will be has already been molded over months-and-months of rumors that “people in the know” (that is, people that have been following the rumors for months) already have a pretty hard and fast opinion about what iCloud is.

I’m included in this group. I’ve read enough speculation about iCloud and examined enough about iCloud’s competition to have already formed my opinion of exactly what iCloud could be. On Monday I’ll either be very happy or very disappointed as whatever iCloud ends up being may not align with my idea of what iCloud should be.

Take for example AOL/TechCrunch’s MG Seigler (whom I read regularly) who recently wrote a rather gloomy post about iCloud.

“One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary.”

Emphasis mine. Notice “was supposed to be”.

Was supposed to be? How does he know what iCloud was supposed to be? No, no. What we’ve all wanted from every product from Apple, including the upcoming iCloud, was for it to ease the biggest pain points in whatever area Apple happens to be touching on with its next product. In reality what we all wanted iCloud to be was a much, much better and more consumer-friendly offering than Google’s or Amazon’s music-in-the-cloud services. One of those pain points is obviously this whole uploading your music to the cloud business. But that doesn’t mean that it will be (though I’m willing to bet it will be better in many ways). But, supposed to be? No. Only in our minds.

I realize that we’re all supposed to read these speculative blog posts with our “hypothetical glasses” on but after a while it begins to grate on me that writers (and Seigler is not alone) tend to believe there own opinions as being fact before they’ve even seen the products they are speculating about. That somehow their own ideas about what a product should be become what the product “was supposed to be” even before they see what the product actually is. And I think that leads to people like me being misinformed.

So, perhaps I’ll slowly back away from all of the speculation that happens before an event like this and try only to follow the headlines. I want to make sure that I’m informed enough to know what is going on but not informed enough to be misinformed.

Here is how David Karp, founder of Tumblr, recently commented on Tumblr’s downtime to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfield.

“Karp admits that the company was “unprepared” for that kind of hockey-stick hypergrowth, but with a new $30 million round in the bank, he says his team is working round the clock to keep scaling and catching up with all the sudden demand. Karp says the growth is coming in part from college students, who really took to the service only since September, 2009 or so and, more recently, international growth in Europe, Japan,and Brazil. He also tells me separately that 65 percent of those pageviews come from Tumblr users looking at their Dashboards (which shows the stream of posts from other people on Tumblr they follow).”

Good.

Also I just found this post on Karp’s blog that has this interesting bit.

“Ah, yes – an incredible opportunity and challenge!

The really impressive piece is that our engineers have been keeping up with this surge in traffic while serving fewer and fewer errors every week. It’s been a rough couple of months, but we’re almost there.”

“Opportunity and challenge” is the perfect way to put it. Karp gets it. Now if only Tumblr assigned someone on the staff to do updates and share stats on these “fewer errors every week” via the main Staff blog? Oh wait, they already did.

Tumblr did a 180. Congrats.

Listorious is a curated directory of Twitter’s new feature Lists. I have no idea how Listourious actually works. On their about page it says it is powered by the Twitter API. TechCrunch reports that Listorious is hand-curated yet is based on the number of followers to a list. So I’m guessing it is a mixture of people and technology. Which is exactly what it should be. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Update: It appears that Listorious can’t see Viddler’s Twitter Lists. Weird. We have two of them.

That pretty much summarizes my morning. But even good things can come from bad situations so here are a few things I learned today after dealing with the WordPress.com situation this morning.

First, I should have never emailed TechCrunch about the issue before I had heard something from the Automattic team. If the problem that I was having was a real, widespread issue then I would have only made it worse by directing attention to it. Second, I probably shouldn’t have written the blog post at all – at least not until after to simply chronicle the issue for posterity. This way it wouldn’t have been inflated, ineffectual, over reaching, and panic inducing. Third, I was misunderstood on multiple levels and by not reacting the way that I did I could have avoided that. I was mistaken about the entire situation. I tried to be of assistance and I ended up causing much to-do about nothing.

I regret publicizing it, regret trying to notify the tech media, and regret how I was misunderstood. I can’t do too much to rectify much if any of this but I can learn and move on – which is exactly what I’m going to do.

— original post below —

This will be a live blog of sorts to keep track of the events taking place right now. About 25 minutes ago, at 9:30am EST, I logged into my WordPress.com account to check my blog’s stats for my post about WordPress Short URLs. I noticed that, in addition to my normal account statistics being there, I also had access to a very high profile, VIP WordPress.com account (who shall remain nameless until Automattic replies).

At 9:31 I called team Automattic’s 877 # on their contact page. Left a voice mail message detailing exactly what is going on and letting them know I’m willing to help in anyway that I can.

About 20 minutes later, after not having gotten any replies yet, I emailed Matt Mullenweg‘s personal email account. Knowing that he’s probably still asleep on the West Coast – I didn’t expect it to help too much but I thought I’d try anything.

About 10 minutes later I figured other people that have WordPress.com accounts should probably know – so I sent an email to tips@techcrunch.com detailing what was happening – but not giving out any restricted information (not even the name of the account that I currently have access to).

When Automattic has the chance to respond, fix the problem, and notify the account that I have access to about the breach – I will update this post with further information. I respect the team at Automattic and I want to give them the chance to fix the problem and address their customers and community before I go any further or release any information as to how this happened and what accounts were affected.

10:30am EST: I’m trying to find a good way for all WordPress.com users to protect themselves until the Automattic team can get to this issue. But I haven’t found much in the way of shutting off access to a WordPress.com account. If any one knows a way, please leave a comment. However, I can suggest that you should log into your account, check out the Authors & Users area and be sure that no one is in there that shouldn’t be.

10:45am EST: Suggestion from friend Chris Coleman: Back up your WordPress blog. Duh! To do this, log into your WordPress.com account, click on Tools > Export and download the file. At least if someone hacks in you’ll be able to restore your blog to normal once this is fixed.

10:55am EST: It seems that my access to the account that wasn’t mine has now been revoked (or fixed). Still no word from Automattic yet but I’m assuming that either the error fixed it self, that the team’s priority was to fix the problem before contacting me, or perhaps an employee at the company whose account I had access to noticed that my user account shouldn’t have been there, and so deleted it.

Stay tuned. I’m hoping to hear from them soon. I will release the account I had access to once they confirm the problem is fixed and they’ve notified that company. I also have screenshots for proof but I am not sure if they’ll want me to share them.

11:10am EST: Someone from Automattic, Hanni Ross (who I don’t see on the team page at all though is a team member), contacted me via AIM and said that this was human error. A one time, one account, issue. Somehow my account and the account of the company’s site that I had access to was – by a human somehow – connected.

To be completely honest I don’t buy it. [Edit: I don't mean for this to sound as though I don't believe Hanni. I just didn't believe that this was a one time thing. More below.] But, as I said earlier, I have a lot of respect for everyone involved with Automattic and so I will take it for what it is. I’ve asked that the company be notified of what happened and that, in some way, it be confirmed that this was not a widespread issue. Hanni mentioned that she’d rather not have me mention the company’s name (which I haven’t yet) but I plan on doing so once the company is notified. If they aren’t, I plan on notifying them. I’ll also explain my reasons why later.

11:40am EST: First, I’ve edited the above paragraph. I never meant to bring into question the integrity of anyone at Automattic. I simply found it hard to believe this problem only effected my account.

I had a chat with Toni Schneider who explained exactly what happened, why it was a one time thing, and what they are going to do to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.

It turns out that when new VIP accounts are created and imported (perhaps from other blogs) the WordPress team creates the user accounts, imports the older blog posts, and other tasks using their own tools to do so. It turns out that whomever was setting this one up accidentally put in my username rather than, perhaps, one that the company wanted. Either that or there is another cdevroe floating around out there. If there is I bet their handsome.

Toni also said that they’d notify the company about this situation so that they have the opportunity to go through their current user access list to be sure there aren’t any other mistakes. Also that they’d create a check when running this routine again to try to help verify no user error.

I asked Toni what the best way to notify the WordPress team about something like this was (since I tried everything that I could think of and had the power to do) and he said to email support@wordpress.com because they have people “checking that email constantly”.

I’m happy with the way this situation turned out. I’m glad it was me that got access to this account and not someone that would have been willing to fool around with blog posts or other content on that company’s high profile site. I’ll be thinking about whether or not to release any other details about this situation in the future but for now I’m glad to get back to work.

This simply isn’t the case. It isn’t that Flickr isn’t very big and has an incredibly impressive amount of photographs, videos, and users – it is just that it isn’t nearly as big as the top-tier photo sharing Web sites.

According to TechCrunch’s recent article “Who Has The Most Photos Of Them All? Hint: It Is Not Facebook” here are the current standings.

1. ImageShack: 20 billion
2. Facebook: 15 billion
3. PhotoBucket: 7.2 billion
4. Flickr 3.4 billion
5. Multiply: 3 billion
6. Picasa “billions” (?)

It appears we really don’t know where Picasa sits on this list but them aside you can see that Flickr is the fourth largest photo sharing Web site. Again, this is really impressive. But look at the gap! PhotoBucket is double the size, Facebook double the size of PhotoBucket, and ImageShack is leading the pack at nearly 7 times the size of Flickr.

Yes, Flickr is pretty big. Yes, Flickr is (in this writer’s opinion) the best way to share photos online at at the moment. But no, they aren’t the biggest – by a mile.

Oh, before I begin, let me just say that I’m completely open to the fact that I could be dead wrong with any of my thoughts below. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct my thinking in the comments section.

TechCrunch doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot “digging” lately.  It seems like, for a lack of a better way to put it, the TechCrunch editors need to be spoon fed stories rather than them hunting them down and finding them.

Maybe the volume of submissions that they get is such that they simply do not have time to go out and find any other stories.  Or, maybe the fault lies on me, for not continuously emailing the editors or driving to their office and barging in, demanding that they cover various things going on at Viddler.

Or maybe they’re just like me. They only have 24 hours in a day and they need to focus on what does them the most good. Maybe they only cover Twitter, Yahoo!, and many other Silicon Valley-based companies because they’re far more interesting to their audience than Viddler’s new customizable player.

It could be that since I failed to go out and tell them about Viddler’s API, our business-to-business Web services, or our Vidgets – that they would have never known about them otherwise.

Let me be clear; I certainly don’t feel shunned by anyone at TechCrunch.  In fact, all of my dealings with everyone there (past and present) has always been great.  They’ve covered Viddler’s launch, and embedded our player on many occassion.  They just don’t seem to be paying attention to some of the things happening over here on the east coast, and I’m wondering what we might be doing wrong.

Some have commented to me; “So long as your users know what is going on, you shouldn’t worry about the TechCrunch audience.”  In some ways I agree with that statement, but we want everyone to know how great Viddler’s services are maturing to be – and we think that those that read TechCrunch deserve to know as much as Center Network’s readers.

I have seen many discussions about TechCrunch and its editors, good, bad, and downright ugly – I hope this post doesn’t come across as anything other than me being honest.  I want the entire world to know about Viddler, and I believe TechCrunch to be an excellent technology blog/online magazine that could be instrumental in helping us achieve that goal.  It just isn’t doing so right now.

Hey TechCrunch! Put Viddler on your radar. Please?

(The above post also relates to any one or any company that covers the technology space. Let me know of other outlets that should be covering Viddler that aren’t and I’ll try to contact them.)

FriendFeed, of which I’m a member, recently launched an iPhone-friendly version of their site.  Notably, however, they’ve done it in such a way that I much prefer to some of the ways other sites have done it.  They detect the iPhone’s mobile browser and automatically format it for you, rather than requiring you to remember the URL of the iPhone-friendly site.

Flickr, on the other hand, has a mobile Website that – while it works fairly well on the iPhone (though it isn’t built for it) – is not interchangeable with the normal Website.  What I mean to say is, if someone links me to a Flickr photo on my iPhone either via Twitter, FriendFeed, or even through an SMS message – I’m forced to be taken to the full-fledged, slow-loading Website without so much as the choice of loading the mobile version.  At least with Twitter I’m able to simply prepend the URL with m.*, which switches the site into “mobile mode”, and see the same content.  Flickr’s URLs for their mobile site aren’t hackable.

FriendFeed does have hackable URLs ((Just insert /iphone/ into any URL.)). Combine the hackability of their URLs with the detection of the iPhone and you’ve got nearly a perfect solution for iPhone users.

Side note: I love the FriendFeed looks nearly the same on my iPhone as it does on my personal computer.  FriendFeed’s design lends itself to this because of its simplicity, lightness, and straight-forward “the content is the design” approach.

Source: FriendFeed iPhone interface.
Via: TechCrunch: FriendFeed Finally Gets iPhone Friendly ((I don’t like the use of the word finally in this title.)).

First, he speaks about Michael Arrington’s crack at Blaine Cook of Twitter.  In short, Arrington puts a lot of blame on Cook for Twitter’s stability issues and then some “experts” reply in the comments.  Then, he talks about some of the opinions being spewed out about WordPress and its supposed downfalls as it pertains to scalability.

Lin is much more versed in the technology, especially the infrastructure, behind-the-scenes in both of these cases than I am – so I will not be offering my opinions here and ask that you read his.  Also, I will not be linking to the other sources of this story, because I’d rather you read them with his context.

Side note about this link: I found this article through Matt Mullengweg who wrote and published a post called Armchair Scaling Experts which has been taken down since and I don’t know why.

Source: random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition.

Scoble’s argument is that companies doing really great things in Israel may, or may not be, getting the same type of PR that companies in Silicon Valley are.

I’d argue that you don’t have to run your company on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea in order to see the same effect.  We at Viddler, in my opinion, are doing some really great things, have big plans, and are doing it for far less than our competition.  However we seldom receive any “press” related to some of the moves we’re making.  One could easily argue that this is a good thing and that we can publicly operate in relative stealth mode – but sometimes it hurts more than it helps.

As a for instance: If I was the Technology Evangelist for a video-sharing site based out of Silicon Valley – do you think my post about what Flickr video means to the rest of the industry would have gone relatively unnoticed by the online press?  I doubt it.  Do I think my post should have gone unnoticed? Yes.  Because I didn’t say anything that any one else wasn’t already thinking.  Sometimes the weight of the words written by those in Silicon Valley are held in too high regard, and I wouldn’t want that to happen to us either.

At the end of the day, I believe Viddler can be successful with or without the PR that is generated mainly by “buzz”.  Buzz may indeed help to spread your message (hopefully the right one) but it definitely not a key to sustainability.  Sustainability comes from building a valuable product or service, wisdom in the marketplace, execution of vision, and “picking the low-hanging fruit” instead of leaving it behind.  If you don’t do that, it wouldn’t matter how many posts Mike Arrington writes about your company.

37signals’ Job Board

The 37signals’ Job Board is probably “the best one” right now. Currently there are offerings from such companies as Apple, Sony, Amazon, Best Buy, and Flickr.

I actually know a few people that have gotten jobs they’ve really loved through 37signals’ board.

Authentic Jobs

An offering by Cameron Moll, Authentic Jobs, covers both full-time and freelance jobs. So if you are a freelance developer or designer, there is a lot of opportunity just waiting here for you.

If you are a company/person looking to fill a position or get a project done, I think Authentic Jobs is your way to go – being that they have a money back guarantee (maybe the others do too).

The Crunch Board

From the hard working people of TechCrunch, the Crunch Board is a lot less personal the the two sites I mentioned above – but these guys are all about business. I think I would check this site last, which is why I’ve ordered it as such, but if you need work – you’ll want to look here.

Why am I linking to Job Boards you ask? Believe it or not, I have people ask me if myself, Viddler, or any other company I know has work. And sometimes I’m able to oblige, but – most of the time – I can’t. So, for all of you reading this, if you need to find some work it can’t hurt to look through the above Job Boards first.

Do you know of any other good Job Boards? List them in the comments and I’ll add them to the post!

A note to 37signals, Authentic Jobs, and the Crunch Board… you may pay for this link via Paypal.

List of recommended boards

Below are boards recommended via email, instant message, Twitter, and/or through the comments on this post.

• Freelance Switch – Recommended by Jay Francis Hunter.
• Live near Philadelphia? The Indy Hall Job Board might be a place to look. Uses Google Groups and is free. — Recommended by Alex Hillman of Independents Hall.
• Do you know JavaScript? John Resig, creator of jQuery, has recently opened a completely free Job Board for JavaScript Ninjas such as yourself.

While I’m going to reserve judgement on any of the recommended boards, I will say that with the Job Boards I listed – the price point seems to be high enough to make sure that the company is very serious about filling the position and/or getting the freelance work done. With the recommended boards, your mileage may vary.

To be continued…

I use the word “tag” everyday. But in this way: “I tagged that photo with these keywords.”

I don’t think this is a serious issue, nor is it one that needs to be debated a ton since people generally understand that “tags” and “keywords” are the same thing. However, I have yet to use or understand Google’s use of “label”.

[tags]google, techcrunch, nomenclature, label, tag, keyword[/tags]
[slug]tag-keyword-label[/slug]