What’s the Biggest Rails App? It Doesn’t Matter
May 27, 2008 Read/Write Web
Once upon a time, whenever anyone asked, “But are there any big applications built on Rails?” The answer was usually, 43Things, anything from 37Signals, or Odeo. But over the past year, there’s no doubt that if there is a poster child for Rails, it is now Twitter. With such notorious bouts of downtime, a worse poster child Rails could not possibly hope for. But is Twitter even the largest application out there running on Rails? Does it even matter?
“Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter [to explain downtime],” wrote Nik Cubrilovic in a recent post on TechCrunch calling out Rails as a poor choice for large scale app development. The debates over what causes Twitter’s frequent outages (we think it’s a database issue) and whether Rails is good for large apps aside, Twitter might not actually be the biggest Rails-based app out there anymore.
Some back of the napkin math by noted rails developer Evan Weaver (who recently went to work for Twitter), finds that while Twitter might be huge in terms of monthly pageviews, the Facebook app Friends for Sale, may still be bigger. And Yellopages and Scribd are similarly massive.
Ignoring the oddities in Weaver’s computation (like, for example, that even though he works at Twitter he only guesses how much traffic the API is fielding), which he admits result in “wildly inaccurate values,” he makes one very good final point: It doesn’t matter!
“It is important to keep in mind how useless this information is. It doesn’t even make sense to say ‘Rails site’ or ‘PHP site,’” says Weaver. “Livejournal uses Perl, Memcached, and MySQL, among other things. Does that make it a Perl site, a MySQL site, or a C site? I don’t know what Scribd uses, but it’s pretty likely that their document pre-renderer is Java or C, not Ruby. Friends for Sale uses Nginx, Rails, Memcached, MySQL, and Linux. Ruby is really just a little piece of the pie.”
Popularity: 8% [?]
When User-Generated Content Goes Bad
May 27, 2008 Read/Write Web
Viral marketing, user-generated content, online buzz: over the past few years, these terms have been representative of a new way of marketing to consumers that takes advantage of the current popularity of the social web. This new technique involves companies encouraging its customers to create content of their own in order to generate interest in the company’s brand. Unfortunately, one of the potential side effects of this strategy is the potential for negative buzz. Despite this fact, a surprisingly low percentage of marketers are monitoring for negative responses.
Users Make UGC, But Few Marketers Monitor It
A Jupiter Research report on this subject analyzes the risks of negative buzz. The report is entitled "When Good Social Marketing Goes Bad," but it should be noted that most people use the term "social marketing" to apply to campaigns that mean to bring about social change. The Jupiter report, however, uses the term more casually to mean any marketing campaign that relies on user-generated content of a viral nature.
What they discovered was that although marketers have been quick to embrace this new trend – 35% allow for user-generated content (UGC) on their own web site and 21% have a profile on a social network – they have not been as quick to monitor and combat the negative buzz that some of their consumers will create.
In fact, only 29% of marketers using these techniques are monitoring the online discussions about their products on an ongoing basis and a shocking 17% don’t monitor online discussions at all. Also, despite the availability of professional "buzz monitoring" services like Nielsen BuzzMetrics or MotiveQuest, only 8% of marketers used these services in 2007.
Who’s Talking Trash?
The Jupiter report was also able to build a profile of the typical creator of negative user-generated content. This person is usually a heavy user of social networks, predominantly male (60% are male) and into technology (40% are influential in this area and 23% are considered "early adopters"). They are also a potential valuable audience for marketers as 49% tend to act as brand advocates – which means they tend to be vocal influencers who spread the word online.
How to Fight the Negative Buzz
Before trying to combat the negative buzz, the first thought needs to be whether or not it’s worth the effort. Often, marketers will attempt to offer these negative UGC creators special treatment or invite them to be beta testers in order to keep the feedback private and productive. However, these tactics are not always practical and they don’t always work, either.
A marketer must be aware of how far and fast their company will go to fix a legitimate complaint and also how likely the complainer is to adjust their response. Keeping in mind that research shows that only 12% of online adults think UGC like those posted on social networks or message boards is "trustworthy," going to great lengths to quiet the naysayers is not always worth the effort.
Of course, sometimes it is worth the effort, which is why the most important thing for a marketer to determine is whether or not the negative content is created by someone who just wants to take a cheap shot at the company, or whether it actually offers genuine insight into a product or service’s failure. If so, then addressing those persons that created the negative UGC makes sense. Then, it can actually be helpful to engage those people openly in the public forum to show the company is listening to valid complaints and responding. That is a difficult choice to make for a company, as it only takes one loud negative voice to affect an influence on the larger group of the company’s customers. However, when done well, this type of response can be a benefit to all.
Conclusion
Lately we’ve seen a lot of companies attempting to combat negative online buzz in new ways – Comcast has been monitoring blogs and social networks for mentions of their company, Digg is now holding online townhalls, and many other companies are offering customer service via Twitter. We’ve also seen the potential volatile situation that can occur when one disgruntled customer’s voice can attract the attention of the whole crowd, as in the situation with Ariel Waldman’s complaint against Twitter. Even she admits on her blog that she never meant "…to bring a mob with pitchforks to Twitter’s door," yet that is the power of even one complaint.
An old adage in advertising and marketing is that "a satisfied customer will, on average, tell five people, but a dissatisfied customer will tell everyone they know." For a company to be successful, especially now when the tools for communication are being intentionally placed in the customers’ hands, it is more important than ever to know how to analyze, monitor, and respond to negative online buzz.
Photo Credits: Angry Latte by ChrisB in SEA;
Attack of The Amancay by Amanky
Popularity: 8% [?]
Why Google is Wooing Web Developers
May 27, 2008 Read/Write Web
Google I/O is the first event for web developers that Google has run. It happens later this week on 28/29 May and Google is expecting 2,500 people to attend. The I/O stands for “Innovation/Open” (i/o is also a programmer term input/output).
Recently I spoke with Tom Stocky, a Director of Product Management at Google, to discuss Google’s sudden interest in web developers.
Google and the Browser
Stocky told me that we’re at an “inflection point for web app development” and that Google is all about “driving usage of the Internet”. He said that the Web is now the defacto platform for application development.
To follow up on that, I asked whether the browser is still the key platform for Google. He replied that the main client for web open standards such as HTML, CSS, Javascript etc is the browser – therefore Google continues to support the browser.
But more than that, Google intends to make that client (the browser) more powerful. They also want to make the cloud (the Internet) more accessible.
Furthermore, Stocky sees the browser as being a key part of the Mobile Web going forward.
Google and RIAs
I asked what Google thinks of RIA (rich internet applications) that are run outside the browser. In particular I mentioned that Microsoft and Adobe are both pushing apps outside the browser, using their RIA platforms. Stocky replied that typically companies sell the underlying proprietary platform and then try to get developers to build on top of that (he didn’t specifically mention them, but he’s obviously referring to MS and Adobe). However, he said, Google’s mission is to build on top of the open web platform.
Stocky said that Google not only aims to build on the open Web platform, but actively improve it. He referred to recent Google releases like Google App Engine (a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure) and Google Gears (a browser plug-in which enables people to use web apps while offline).
Why the Sudden Interest in Developers?
I asked Stocky why has Google decided that now is the right time to get web developers behind them? I didn’t mention it, but I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Google’s outreach to developers has happened at about the same time that tech blogs like ReadWriteWeb have gotten access to Google PR and product teams. In other words, up till this year developers and bloggers alike have been subject to a Steve Jobs-like veil of secrecy over the inner workings of Google.
Stocky told me that it’s been an evolutionary thing. 2-3 years ago, he said, Google had just a couple of APIs. So there wasn’t much to engage developers with at that time. Now in 2008 they have 40+ APIs and Google has “realised the benefits of investing in the open web platform”. He also admitted that one of those benefits is that it enhances Google’s revenue.
So web developers (and bloggers) are getting a more open, remixable Google in 2008. That’s great to see – and we can only wish that a certain Cupertino-based company follows that precedent!
Web Developers, Web Developers, Web Developers!
I did my best to entice a Steve Ballmer-like chant of “Web Developers, Web Developers, Web Developers” out of Tom Stocky, but the best he would give me was: “Google is native to the Web” 
What do you think of the new open(ish) Google? And let us know in the comments if you’re attending Google I/O and if so what do you expect to get out of it.
Related: ReadWriteTalk did a podcast with Tom Stocky in April.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Results: Data Portability’s Future
May 27, 2008 Read/Write Web
A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.
Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players – Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project – will play out the future of Data Portability.
To remind you of the background to the game. Recently three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all of these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone’s guess. So we created an interactive app from Impact Games that lets you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement, as well as share your opinions about what they should do.
The Results
A reminder that the ‘opinion’ category is what you hope will happen and ‘prediction’ is what you think will happen.
Two points were consistent with our expectations:
- The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won’t.
- The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.
One result that surprised us was that many people didn’t expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.
For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina’s post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure’s response.
What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Semantic Tagging with Faviki
May 27, 2008 Read/Write Web
Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not – semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.
About Faviki
Faviki’s backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).
This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it’s simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world – Wikipedia – their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.
Using Faviki
Despite Faviki’s lofty goals, it’s just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site’s tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.
A Search on Faviki
Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link- that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it’s also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.
What Problem Faviki Solves
Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.
There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.
If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.
Popularity: 6% [?]
