I think we (and when I say we I mean "I") all get into such a groove with consuming these different free services and tools that we've started to act a bit like spoiled children, complaining because of down time, lack of features and other "burdens" that prevent us from using these *free* services. We (read: I) start to feel entitled to these services and the first time we feel the slightest burden we're firing up Google to look for something bigger and better (Plurk ring a bell?).
I made that comment on Twitter tonight for a petty reason: I wrote to disqus to give them some feedback and ask about a feature that said "coming soon", I didn't hear back. Clearly I was being impatient because it wasn't more than a week ago. Another instance is this whole Plurk thing. It's clearly a Twitter-like micro blogging site, and that's fine, but I found myself wanting to jump on there real quick because, oh no, omg, Twitter has down time and that so interferes with my social flow. What a big baby.
I'm writing all of that to say this, I'm going to stop looking at these as merely social web services and look through them to see who the people are behind these companies. You know Daniel Ha (disqus) and Loic Le Meur (seesmic) and Sean Moss (Ping.fm) probably don't sleep much because they're busy working on these awesome services that are shaping how we communicate on the internet as we know it. Only to have people sit around and complain about them.
So what now? I'm going to start to be more positive. I already made up my mind that although I have a plurk account, I'm staying on Twitter because I like Twitter. Taking what I said above, thinking about the people behind the company, I imagine those guys are doing everything they can to keep things steady. Heck, they even had one person who's sole purpose is to "...have somebody sit there and watch it constantly, and then manually switch databases over and re-build when one of the slaves fail". (link) Hearing us grumble about it probably isn't doing much for their morale. If I have a beef I'll send out an email and maybe grumble lightly at the most, gotta have that.
Also just as a side note I think the transparency we've been seeing with Twitter's new update blog and the blog at disqus is awesome (Check out their latest blog entry titled A Commenter's Rights. One thing that instantly turned me off about plurk (and here I go again, complaining) is the about page for the company was not really about them at all. It was more focused on the clever copywriting and hype/fluff. Again that's ok (try Joe! try!) but it's not for me. I want to see people like Daniel Ha and Sean Moss and know what their struggles and milestones are. Anyway thought I'd throw that in. That last part was free.
jyoseph
06.04.2008
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For example, I lived in a small town for a while, and there was a tiny mom & pop video rental store there. Dark, dank, and mostly old films, rarely anything new. The people there were awesome though, very passionate about movies. Then Hollywood Video came along, and their store was bigger, shiny, clean, bright, and their prices were lower per rental. Of course people are going to flock to Hollywood, even though they like the people behind the mom & pop store. That store ended up going out of business within 5 months. It's sad, but like I said, it's our nature to want better service for less.
Services like Twitter and Disqus, to stay ahead of the game, listen to complaints and criticism, and I imagine the feedback that you provide them are invaluable. It's in their best interest to understand this.