BrockLi Soup

Twitter’s scaling problems are near-legendary. Ever since it really took off last spring at SXSW, it’s been going down for short periods on a near-daily basis. It’s a cliché, but Twitter has been straining under the weight of its own success.

This most recent spate of problems has been especially bad, though. I don’t know if anything in particular happened to cause it, but the IM functionality and pagination have been disabled for most of the past couple weeks. Even then, it just doesn’t work at all a couple times a day when the load is too high.

Unlike so many other people, I’m not complaining. It kind of sucks, but Twitter is a free service - the way I see it, if I haven’t paid them, they don’t owe me jack diddly. People are getting really upset about the downtime, and I don’t understand the sense of entitlement that makes one believe they deserve some level of service from a company that’s doing it for free.

No, I’m actually kind of thankful. The thing I do have in common with the Twitter-bashers is a mild Twitter addiction, and when you can’t see more then the most recent 20 tweets on your friends page, you start to lose interest. I still love Twitter and check it a few times a day, but now I don’t really worry about the ones I miss - if something important happens to someone close to me, I’ll probably hear about it either way. It’s like a little reminder that, hey, there’s more out here than the Internet.

After a long Twitter hiatus, Fonny returned to MICROBLOGGING, and we got to talking about it online.

Fonny: I think Twitter is a little silly personally

Fonny: I’m making fun of my friend who told me that lately he’s been “getting into microblogging”

Brock: that’s like saying concerts are a little silly because you don’t like boy bands

It reminds me of that line in Team America: World Police about “use your acting,” as if “acting” was the solution. A few years ago, people were going on and on about how “blogging” can give your company a good image, and be used for personal branding, and will groom your dog. Now, microblogging will solve everything! And widgets! WEB TWO POINT OH!

I don’t want to name names, but some people I’ve seen around the Internets seem to attribute a lot of power to reasonably abstract concepts. “Blogging” isn’t a thing anyone can really pin down, because it means different things to different people. It’s not a solution, or a problem, or anything specific even - a blog is a means of delivering content, and anyone that tries to give it a more specific or meaningful definition probably doesn’t understand it as well as they think they do, or at least works in marketing.

It drives me nuts when I hear people say things like “blogs are stupid,” because it’s so generic. I think the concert analogy I made to Fonny makes sense: one would sound pretty stupid if they dismissed concerts altogether because they didn’t like a particular band that’s playing. Fine, you don’t like the band, but that doesn’t invalidate the idea of public performance. It’s the same thing with blogs. Fine, maybe you don’t like the way Heather Armstrong writes about her life, but that doesn’t mean blogs are worthless - it means you shouldn’t bother reading dooce. There’s a ton of really good stuff being put out there everyday, and I hate to see people dismiss it all because they’ve only managed to find the crappy parts. The same thing goes for Twitter: there’s a lot of crap, but that doesn’t make the service or the concept inherently worthless.

Anyway, Fonny and I had a nice chat about it, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s one of the people doing this. He just got me thinking about it, and I wanted to include him because really, and how can you not love that face!

You Look Nice Today is a new one from lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies, and it’s my favorite.

I’ve tried out a lot of podcasts in the past year or so, and a lot of them are decidedly mediocre. These are the ones that have proven they’re worth keeping in iTunes.

Diggnation

Diggnation is hosted by Digg founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, and covers some of the most popular stories from Digg. The two of them sit on a couch with their laptops and drink beer while discussing news stories. You definitely want to get the video version of this one. Posted weekly.

Totally Rad Show

The Totally Rad Show is just that: rad. It’s hosted by Alex Albrecht (of Diggnation) along with Dan Trachtenberg and Jeff Cannata. It’s sort of a geek tour de force: they discuss movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games. It can be a little cheesy, but they’re reviews and arguments are as entertaining as they are informative. Posted weekly.

Onion News Network

A video version of The Onion.

Onion Radio News

Daily radio news from The Onion - short and sweet.

This American Life

Hosted by Ira Glass, This American Life tells a variety of stories on Chicago’s PRI. The radio show is posted weekly after airing on the radio.

Savage Love

The weekly out-loud call-in version of Dan Savage’s sex advice column. Dan’s a funny guy to listen to, and it can be informative. I wouldn’t listen to this one at work.

Macbreak Weekly

A weekly roundup of Mac news, hosted by This Week In Tech’s Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, and a rotating band of commentators. It’s probably only about 50% Mac news and a lot funnier than you’d expect.

Mr. Deity

I wish this one was updated more often, because it’s probably my favorite. God is a regular guy, the Devil is his ex-girlfriend, and Jesse (Jesus) keeps pushing for an insurance plan that covers crucifixion.

Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary

Abigail is a 13 year-old girl with Bloomberger syndrome, so she looks like a 35 year-old man, but she still hangs out with her BFF Madison and has a thing for her classmate Lance. Hilarious every time.

Midwest Teen Sex Show

The Midwest Teen Sex Show offers sex advice to teens. I can’t explain how funny this actually is, so I won’t bother trying.

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

I came across the Booksthatmakeyoudumb project thanks to Kottke, and it’s pretty entertaining. Virgil Griffith compared the top 10 favorite books for college’s on Facebook to the average SAT scores for those colleges. On the high end, you’ve got Catch-22 and Freakonomics. On the low end, The Holy Bible and “I don’t read.”

I found it interesting to look at the list of schools. RIT is number 183, in average SAT score, but I was surprised to see that The Bible is the top book for the school. If you’re logged into Facebook, you can see all our stats and learn, like I did, that Boondock Saints is the most popular movie at RIT.

For the second time this week, I’m wreaking havoc on my subscriptions in Google Reader, because ya know what? I don’t need this much news, nor the guilt I feel for never reading it. Even so, I feel just a little guilty every time I removed a blog, even though I don’t know any of the authors and rarely even read their posts.

I’m down to around 130 feeds now. I know that sounds ridiculous, until I tell you that I cut about 60 earlier this week, and 20 more since I started writing this post. A lot of the remaining 130 don’t update regularly - probably 20 are friends that don’t blog much, and another 30 are other low-post feeds. I can’t believe that six months ago, I managed to keep up on so many of them. No wonder I didn’t go out much.

And as long as we’re talking productivity, I FINALLY started reading Getting Things Done this week. I’ve been reading it on the Metro, so I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I’m feeling a lot more relaxed - knowing that I’m at least taking some initiative to sort out this mess has reduced my stress level a fair bit. Cleaning out my feed reader is step one - I know very little about the GTD system at this point, but I think that getting rid of all that unnecessary distraction will help.

And as long as we’re talking books, I also started The God Delusion last week, and I’m liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Richard Dawkins has always seems kind of dry, and…well, BRITISH, so I was worried it would be boring, but he keeps a pretty good pace. It’s another book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally got around to starting.

And as long as we’re talking about God, I feel I should mention that we decided on Friday that “God” shall henceforth be known as “göd” (pronounced sort of like “gurd,” for those of you that don’t speak German). Just so you all know.

Apparently San Francisco has been having some power troubles, which means that I can’t use Craigslist or search Yelp. Strangely enough, the search seems to be the only thing wrong with Yelp right now: I can navigate around just fine, but I can’t find new stuff. I rarely use either site, and now that I want both of them I get neither.

I’ve recently started using Tumblr, which lies somewhere between a full-blown blog and Twitter. I like it because it sort of fills in this middle ground - there are plenty of times when I want to jot down a thought, but it’s more than Twitter’s 140 character limit and not enough to bother writing a blog post around. Tumblr allows for regular blog-style posts, but it also specially handles photos, videos, quotes, links, and conversations. Furthermore, you can import feeds as any one of those types. So, for example, my Flickr photos are pulled in and displayed nicely, my Twitters are included as text posts, and any time I tag links with “tumblr” on del.icio.us, they appear as links. And, it colorizes conversations and displays quotes in…well, in a quote-y manner. Here, look at this one, and you’ll see what I mean.

I don’t think anyone is actually following mine, and that’s fine with me. I still haven’t read Getting Things Done, but I hear that the important part is making a note of things you think of so you don’t feel like you have to remember it, so you can get to thinking about other stuff. In that respect, Tumblr works well for me: I can paste in AIM conversations that I know I’ll enjoy reading later, or include a quote from a book that I really like. It doesn’t matter too much if other people are reading it, because I’m using it to store stuff that I want to see again later.

Of course, you’re welcome to enjoy it too.

Friends: I need a good way to keep track of my contacts - phone numbers, addresses, web sites, things like that. I’m not too fond of Address Book or Outlook, and really, I’d prefer something web-based so I can get to it anywhere. I considered buying a cheap Palm (or equivalent), but don’t really want to spend money, or carry another device, or have a single fail-point.

Anyone know a site that’s free, reliable, and won’t sell my friends to spammers?

I’ve been meaning to write a post about how much I hate MySpace, but I really don’t see the point - I couldn’t possibly say anything we don’t all know already. It just boggles my mind that such an awful site has built up such a huge user base, even as everyone complains about it (guilty).

One of the biggest complaints lately has been all the spam (as if the on-page ads weren’t bad enough). I was just checking out The Walkmen (they’ll be opening for The Kaiser Chiefs tonight), and their comments are drowning in it. Other services, like Facebook, do a better job of keeping it at bay; I’ve been on Facebook a lot longer than MySpace, and I’ve never seen a single bit of spam anywhere. I’m not really sure what they’re doing different - maybe they validate your e-mail when you sign up, I don’t remember now - but it’s working. More people are moving away from MySpace to Facebook and other sites like it.

And this makes me happy. I mostly use MySpace to check up on bands, or hear music from new ones. I’ll miss that when it’s gone, but some other service will surely rise to fill that hole. There are a few people with whom I only have contact through MySpace, and the sooner they get off there and into Facebook or whatever, the sooner I can just leave the damn thing behind - and I certainly won’t be the only one leaving.