Tag fail

I downloaded Seesmic for Windows today! (I’ve been waiting for this, ever since I saw it announced and previewed at PDC09!  Get ready for a whirlwind tour of “Wow, that’s cool” and a whole lot of “Seriously? Fail.”   And yes, this post will be heavily focused on comparing it to TweetDeck and the experience encountered there (Hey, have to judge against a baseline, right? :))

Starting with the basic look and feel – this is how things look when viewed from the “All” Tab – Quite uniform, side by side.

Here are some of the Positive things about this interface:

• Seems to have a nice scrolling feel to it, and updates rather dynamically
• Each Column fits ~13 tweets (TweetDeck tends to hit a maximum of 10 tweets per column)
• The ability to interface and work with the Twitter defined Lists, so all lists you’ve created can be managed in this screen!

Some things I would consider gracious limitations of this interface

• No ability to modify the look/feel of the interface (I’m stuck with black text on a white background)
• I’m limited to a maximum of 5 columns available on screen (TweetDeck lets me get atleast 6 columns)
• For whatever reason, the ability to manage the Twitter defined lists = fail, and users are unable to be dragged into Lists to be managed (see below)
• Dragging a person and dropping them onto a Twitter Lists leaves a lock on them (and fails)

Alright, but once you see past the interface, you can tweet easier and better, right?

Here is a side by side tweet test, using Seesmic Desktop, and TweetDeck

When using the Seesmic for Windows Interface, a tweet which looks like:

Test Tweet from Seesmic Getting your beta on for the holidays! (Exchange and WinMo6.5) https://www.pkguild.com/2009/11/getting-your-beta-on-for-the-holidays-exchange-and-winmo6-5/ 

translates into –39 Characters Remaining and Posting Failed

Taking the exact same tweet:

Test Tweet from TweetDeck Getting your beta on for the holidays! (Exchange and WinMo6.5) https://www.pkguild.com/2009/11/getting-your-beta-on-for-the-holidays-exchange-and-winmo6-5/

And the Tweet auto shortens and is ready to tweet, with a surplus of 31 characters!

So, what you’re going to say is “Well, you can click “Link” enter the URL and shorten it.   Yes, I absolutely can, if I thought there was a purpose behind manually shortening a URL when I clearly expect the App to be intelligent enough to figure that out.  If TweetDeck can figure it out, and he’s a behemoth of memory and obesity, Seesmic can get a clue and do the same.    I had WANTED to do this test with the Web based Twitter interface which USED to auto-shorten URL’s, but apparently, they did away with that.  WTF? Yea. Seriously.

So, sadly, the sheer lack of features in Seesmic for Windows prevents me from going into too many more details.  And don’t get me wrong, this is a POSITIVE review, it’s just with the sheer lack of features, optimizations, simplicity and ease of use compared to TweetDeck, I won’t  be switching full-time like I had planned to.

And if you think that Seesmic for Windows will use less memory than TweetDeck – At first (and by at first I mean at IMMEDIATE Launch) it will use up less memory than TweetDeck since TD prestages a lot and pulls up history, however shortly after running the two will start to even out and normalize.    So this won’t be a win for Seesmic for Windows.

I do encourage you to take the plunge and dive into the beta, check it out and make your own judgement and decision.  It can ONLY get better, because in its extremely sparse state at the moment I’m not sure it could possibly get any worse!

Welcome to the thunder in a series of ‘when cloud computing goes wrong’ type scenarios.

Cloud computing it touted for its reliability, scalability and stability, infact it doesn’t even need backups, but we’ll take them anyway!   Until THIS happens.

SearchStorage ANZ reports that “in late January, ma.gnolia experienced a catastrophic data loss event and turned to backups to restore its database of users’ bookmarks. Both the primary and secondary backups failed irrevocably.”

I guess it just goes to show, that your cloud is only as stable as your infrastructure, your backups are only as good as your restores, and your business is only as viable as your ability to maintain and sustain it.    Being in a cloud doesn’t make you immune to getting struck by lightning, infact it increases the likely-hood even more when you’re not grounded.

Grounded definition according to cxipedia:

Having solid foundation, connected to stable technologies, having backups and ensuring that data is recoverable from them.

I’m sure if they had a shadow test/dev environment they could have rebuilt from that, but I guess that’s just my sensibilities coming through. grin.