thoughts on computing

In my earlier post I commented on my own little experiment about Web 2.0 infrastructure’s ability to handle even modest-interest events.

Well my initial verdict was that most players had fallen flat on their face … badly.

Now Techcrunch has a post detailing how badly Twitter really did … and it was apparently abysmal. More detail by Mike Bogle (from the event) here.

Of course, the Techcrunch post somehow overlooks the equivalent failures over at Crunchgear – imagine that!

On the negative side these failures show just how immature these architectures still are … of course, on the positive side it absolutely demonstrates the widespread need for something better … something like our EAF!

I was experimenting around a bit with different ways to track the macworld keynote from my cozy office. I figured this would be good nano-metric on how far we’ve matured web 2.0 scaling techniques, particularly when focusing on delivering an event experience. This is a perfect example of a specialized community – bigger than some, smaller than many.

Sorry to say that every venue that was directly trying to cover the keynote has to get a mad kitty. I was hoping for better.

Irritated Kitties

Starting with a sort of “irritated kitty” were engadget and gizmodo … both of their live posts timed out quite a bit at first, then settled down and responded ok, albeit slowly.

Tried following the twitter feed of TUAW, but twitter’s website started timing out a few minutes before the start of the keynote. Kept timing out for another five or ten minutes, so I gave up. Btw, don’t know about their SMS distribution since I choose to turn it off momentarily (I do have biz to do!).

[update] Twitter died hard during the keynote.

Mad Kitties

[update] Crunchgear was apparently pretty hosed during the event.

Ran into “stevenotelive.com” and tried that … had it up for a half hour before the start of the event, during which they ran a continuos loop boasting on their “ridiculous bandwidth”. They had a little counter that was over a thousand 15 minutes before the start of the event, and then …

They were right, it was pretty ridiculous. So ridiculous that when the event started it just blew it’s guts all over the floor. I was never able to get a connection, much less sustain any streaming whatsoever.

Apple didn’t even try to broadcast the event, and the promised iphone updates were not available when Jobs said that they were.

But probably the biggest mad kitty of all goes to Randy Newman, who apparently compared the US and President Bush to Hitler and Stalin. The US has zillions of flaws, but that’s not even rational. I think this dude’s been on the road (or something else) WAY too long. Time to retire, Randy.

The Verdict

For a little speech that is big by tech-world standards, not much worked very well. As far as I’m aware there weren’t any live streaming systems that worked at all. The text-based wide-distribution stuff (I focused on twitter) didn’t make it. The blog-based stuff worked intermittently, and the iphone update server reported errors for awhile.

Of course, this is not a comprehensive view … just a little core-sample from our own industry’s back yard. I think the right answer is that our industry still has a long way to go to handle modest special-interest scale, without even beginning to deal with truly society-wide scale.

First things first, I suppose – let’s starting using more app fabrics to make the basics work better!

[update] Apple software update does appear to be creaking along now, a half hour after the keynote ended.

[update 2] The Macbook Air looks pretty cool though, I must admit!

[update 3] Engadget sort of owns up to their outages … nobody else does so far.

[update 4] Crunchgear posts their own mea culpa.

[update 5] In a big bit of irony, Techcrunch bags on Twitter, but gives Crunchgear a pass.