Valleywag: Jack Dorsey

Robert Scoble, other Valley bon vivants subject of latest ego-stroking linkbait

Jackson West — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:00:00 PDT

Vancouver-based NowPublic is ostensibly all about citizen journalism. But since Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to it and signed up as an advisor, it's becoming better known for publishing flattering lists of "influencers," supposedly ranking them according to various social media metrics. The first "Most Public" list focused on New York, but a new list for the Valley and San Francisco is "coming soon." And by virtue of being included in the latest edition, we received an early copy as a press release. Who comes out on top? Ubiquitous attention slut Robert Scoble, naturally. Full list after the jump.

Robert Scoble

Michael Arrington

Jack Dorsey

Biz Stone

Matt Cutts

Pete Cashmore

Dave Winer

Guy Kawasaki

Loïc Le Meur

Kevin Rose

Merlin Mann

Stowe Boyd

Jeff Atwood

Jeremiah Owyang

Veronica Belmont

Kara Swisher

Scott Beale

Marc Andreessen

Ryan Block

David Sifry

Emily Chang

Om Malik

Timothy Ferriss

Nick Douglas

John Battelle

David Cohn

Louis Gray

Tom Foremski

Tim O'Reilly

Ariel Waldman

Matt Mullenweg

Dean Takahashi

Philip Kaplan

JD Lasica

Sarah Lacy

Brian Solis

Charlene Li

Rafe Needleman

Dan Farber

Howard Rheingold

David McClure

Margaret Mason

Jason Goldman

Leah Culver

Chris Shipley

Jackson West

Liz Gannes

Owen Thomas

Adeo Ressi

Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

Twitter's existential crisis a masterwork of fingerpointing

Owen Thomas — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:00:00 PDT

Twitter's founders are waging a behind-the-scenes war with Blaine Cook, the blogging service's former chief architect. The subject: Who's responsible for the service's perpetual outages. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington ran a series of leading questions about Twitter's infrastructure, attributing them to "people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture." I don't think that's true, if only because I received a similar set of questions, before Arrington's post went up, from a source who identified himself as a "friend of Blaine." In their official response, Twitter cofounders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone — they're the two one always forgets about, because they're not as interesting as Evan Williams — go out of their way to avoid naming names.

But it's clear they're talking about Cook, who they identify, rather insultingly, as "a former systems administrator." The post brags about "a recently enhanced staff of amazing systems engineers formerly of Google, IBM, and other high-profile technology companies." That, too, is an obvious dig at Cook, who's mostly worked at startups.

But the friend of Blaine who emailed us about Twitter's outage puts the blame on an "operations guy" at Twitter, whom he describes as a "fucking moron." He writes:

The whole story is that it takes more than just Blaine to keep Twitter up and running and whether servers are up, properly configured and not running hot definitely doesn't fall under the developers' responsibilities.

The other part of the dispute was whether Twitter needed to be rewritten in another programming language. Perhaps, but that wasn't the real issue in scaling, according to the Cook camp.

We're utterly unqualified to evaluate the technical arguments here. But the back-channel badmouthing that's going on here? We're experts at that, and we rate it utterly delicious. As fingerpointing goes, this Twitter battle takes the prize.

Ariel Waldman, Twitter, and the "whore" algorithm

Melissa Gira Grant — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:00:00 PDT

Don't call Ariel Waldman a "whore" where Google can hear you. That's the only firm conclusion we can draw from a confusing fracas that left even Twitter cofounder Biz Stone unsure who can call whom a whore on the service. Waldman, a blogger and community manager at quasi-rival messaging site Pownce, called out Twitter for allegedly failing to uphold its own terms of service, setting off an online firestorm.

Waldman's complaint: Using a (now-offline) anonymous Twitter account, @confess, a user called Waldman a "crack-whore," and mockingly congratulated her for having "graduated to soft-core lesbian porn!" When Waldman asked Twitter's team to warn or remove the user, founder Jack Dorsey declined, on the grounds that "we've reviewed the matter and decided it's not in our best interest to get involved." Waldman believes Twitter owes it to their community to do just that, and got them involved instead.

She took the dispute to her blog, instantly become a cause célèbre — with 700 comments, 2,000 Diggs, and a raging debate on customer-service discussion board Get Satisfaction.

As CNET's Caroline McCarthy observed, "in the bubble-like culture of Web 2.0, Waldman is a sort of celebrity — and with celebrity comes scrutiny and often ugly commentary." Attention magnifies attention. Now Waldman's an even larger public figure, and therefore target — and sure enough, she's been called a whore a whole lot more after the incident than before.

Being called a "whore" online is one thing, but being called one in connection with one's search results? This may be Waldman's deeper gripe. "Anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity," she writes. Twitter enjoys a stratospheric rank in Google's search results, making it a favorite in the world of social media marketers — the world in which Waldman works. But the spat has only strengthened the associations between Waldman's good name and the bad ones she's been called, from the all-powerful Google algorithm's point of view.

For a few, this reporter included, getting the mantle of "whore" tossed atop one's search results might be a value add, but for most, it's a detractor from the business at hand. What hurts Waldman as much as the misogynist namecalling is that potential business partners will see a social-media expert who's bad-mouthing a rival service to shame it into managing her online reputation for her.

(Photo by adactio)

Twitter cops to messing up everybody's Stevenote

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:00:31 PST

Twitter nearly downed Valleywag's liveblog of the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Macworld. And apparently we weren't the only ones affected. "We seem to be up at the moment, but we had a flood of traffic around the Macworld Keynote this morning," Twitter developer Alex Payne wrote in a Twitter-dedicated Google group yesterday during the speech.

Payne and company fixed the problem, the developer wrote, by increased the API rate limit and disallowing unauthenticated requests to the API. Which means they widened the door into Twitter's database, but installed a more careful bouncer to review who wanted in. Eventually, Twitter got a bit faster. Perhaps it's a good thing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey never made it into this year's keynote. He might have gotten booed off the stage.

Now we know what Twitter's good for: not much

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:19:02 PST

So my boss is at Macworld right now and he's expecting Twitter's Jack Dorsey to take the stage in a matter of minutes. Of course, you should be hearing about this from him in our liveblog of the event. But we used a Twitter embed. And it's broken. And, depending on when you're visiting the 'Wag, it's either not working or loading really slow. Break a leg, Jack!

Twitter CEO "looking forward to a big week"

Owen Thomas — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:20:27 PST

Why is Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, "looking forward to a big week"? It could be that Twitter investor Fred Wilson is in town. Always exciting to have a board member around. But more likely, Dorsey is anticipating tomorrow's keynote, where Apple is expected to announce a built-in Twitter app for the iPhone.