It looks nice after halfway down and individual post looks nice too - Brenda McLaren
I wonder what the ratio of people going to the site vs. RSS is. RSS wouldn't see a difference. - Louis Gray
I could dig up and post exact numbers Louis. Only ~20% of website hits are to the homepage or one of the main pages - so we worked on having the article pages nice. Still a lot more to come out in terms of both design and features. - Nik Cubrilovic
Makes sense, Nik. That's likely true across the Web, especially in the tech blog space. Thanks for the answer. - Louis Gray
The homepage *is* busy. But, overall, I really like the new design. And the article pages are clean and modern. - Chris Baskind
@Nik Cubrilovic: I love TechCrunch (& predominantly hit via the homepage) but am a little disappointed. I appreciate your position but believe you can find a better, more homepage_reader-friendly solution. On my screen there is still a sizeable margin on either side - I suggest you tweak your layout to increase article space and fill-out the article column to full width after the advertising panel. Please let me know what you think. - Nick Mutton
It may have less content room but I do like the design alot more. It's alot cleaner. - Aaron Myers
Aaron: it's cleaner, yes, but now you need to click each article to read the article. Great, generates another page view which is great for advertising, but it's definitely harder to read. Luckily we have RSS, but how long will TC keep giving us full text feeds? - Robert Scoble
Robert: Eh! I didn't even pay that much attention, my fault. I read my RSS feeds in NetVibes as well as FeedBurner e-mails that come throughout the day. You are right, after a 2nd look - I don't like that I have to make the "jump" to read the whole article. - Aaron Myers
@Nick: Thats a good point, we are trying to make the width fluid but its not easy to do well. At the moment the width is fixed and thus we need to aim it at the lowest common screen width which nowadays is 1024 - Nik Cubrilovic
chased me away... i hate to click Read Post ... the cool thing about them was the whole article was right there ... eff'n'ay - Gregory Lent
@Aaron. The full articles are now on the permalink because the homepage was becoming too long. Posting full content in chronological order works to a certain point and then it just breaks. We can now have a lot more content on the homepage and users can get a snapshot of the days stories. When you are on the permalink page you can click next/prev story. We have never been pageview driven, if we were we would do what CNET and others do and provide just headlines in RSS and all the other tricks. - Nik Cubrilovic
We are just over a single pageview per visitor at the moment, and will always have full text feeds. we are also fully open with crunchbase as well and let anybody suck data. so talking about Techcrunch and pageview whoring at the same time will always be a null argument (same with the outbound link meme from last week). there are a hundred other sites we could bitch about when it comes to pageview whoring :) - Nik Cubrilovic
You guys actually visit the website? (Instead of subscribing through your RSS reader)? - Nikhil Dandekar
We actually did the same thing over at Mashable last month - we decided since my editorials and Sean's lists were consistently running multiple screenfuls (as well as most news posts running longer) that it'd be best to just to put a more thing in than sacrifice load times, a stat which has never been pretty on our site. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
it gives me an horizontal scroll bar with a 1024 resolution... not nice :-( - Marcos Marado
True. You need at least one more click (from homepage) to read a full article. Greader still looks like the best way to read/follow TC. - Martin Añazco
I also thought it was hard to read, or clearly focus on what was important. It screams, just read my RSS. - Dan Rockwell via twhirl
Yeah, I think it looks like it's 2/3rds ads now. - Dawn
they are big boys, know what they are doing, but i don't like it .. keep the top column width all the way down, is my two rupees worth - Gregory Lent
do people follow techcrunch outside of a feed reader? that sounds inefficient - Justin via twhirl
@justin, i have a hard time with feed readers, they take so much editing and give so much unwanted stuff, i just go to sites from bookmarks when i feel called to, or follow links, following my intuition more than google's river of readthis - Gregory Lent
seems like advertising is first priority and content is second. - Eric Sessions
TechCrunch hasn't provided anything more substantive than ads for some time. Yawn. So glad I unsubscribed from TC. - Tom Morris
a hard business to sell, it is one person's pov, he goes, what is left? - Gregory Lent
looks more magazine-format - maximize ad space - Morgan
This is fantastic. Must-read for a newbie entrepreneur. I found it 500 times more useful than the stuff you find for "how to incorporate" on Google. :-) - Sid Yadav via Bookmarklet
I agree. Wish I would have had someone explaining things to me BEFORE I hired a lawyer to help. It was still a good idea but not COMPLETELY necessary. - Dave Ploch
I think that instead of designing services that help us create more and more micro content, we should be trying to create and promote services that help us to filter the best of the more intelligent, thoughtful fare. - Tom Landini
Good post Marco. Although I came to help expose the podcast to more people (I was not here to build a castle), I find the conversation and interaction has been great. The problem of losing almost all followers though, makes it hard to kick start this thing again. Some people followed because I said something interesting, and now they will likely never follow again. It takes time to build those connections. Thank goodness for FF. - Eric @ CS Techcast
thanks @cs - pretty much same here - once I saw the level of interaction and conversation here I was hooked but I have always like the fact that Twitter is much more mobile friendly (especially for those of us in BB world) - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
@Marco, friendfeed has a decent mobile interface, even for a crackberry. I prefer fftogo.com however and it looks decent on my Curve. - Rob Diana
FF on Windows Mobile with Opera is very usable. Just signed up for Identi.ca, going to give it a try. - Eric @ CS Techcast
@rob i've tried fftgo but for whatever reason wasn't thrilled with it - i need to give it another look. There is just so much more information on FF it makes it tough to take in and process on BB - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
Probably the best headline of the day. Anyone else plan to beat it? - Louis Gray
I love articles that strategically use bold text to emphasize key points. Easy read. Good post Marco - Bwana McCall
lol @anthony does that come with a prize? if so can I request the return of the people I was following on twitter? @louis i may just have to print and frame your comment ; ) a guy's gotta do something to compensate for the content! - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
That was a very good post. Loved your writing. - Michael Narciso
Good points here Marco. It's always been about your existing network with Twitter. That's what's carried it through the tough times. I expect Twitter will survive this issue though. People are losing followers, but I see numbers like "had 2,500, now have 2,100". The big numbers are still there. - Hutch Carpenter
Okay guys this is just stupid. Can a few of you go over to the blog and comment? Is that too much to ask? I just went there and read the article because 25+ people liked it and a dozen commented but no one took the time to say a word on his site.. This is wrong in my opinion, make an effort to grow a guys on-site community. - Roger Kondrat
@michael ty - @hutch ty and I hope you are right - but I do worry that this has now opened a door that can't be closed. If they communicate their plans to help people reconnect with lost subscriptions (if thats possible) and what measures will be put in place to prevent this from happening again I think they can pull it out. I think people were willing to deal with the intermittent outages so long as they could still communicate with their group later but if users can't rely on that... - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
its a definite black eye on anyone who just adopted twitter in the past 6 months or so, its basically taking money out of your pocket, taking expectations out of your hand. The service going down, I can take that, taking away what I earned, that sucks royaly. Like going into an WoW and seeing all your characters gone, well right then at that moment its well, I guess I can leave this place now, too much work to redo. But twitter has the wild card of addicted adoption, WoW players can start again, so can twitters, not fun, but we can do it. - Dan Rockwell via twhirl
Roger - your comments sometimes verge into troll territory. - Hutch Carpenter
@CS I totally agree. Its always that way i find. - Roger Kondrat
@Roger - First, calm down. Second, blog commenting is over rated, it's very hard to carry a conversation on a blog compared to FriendFeed. We comment here because it's easy for everyone to look at what's been said. No offense to Marco but I don't frequent his site enough to really comment on his blog so if I commented I would probably never go back to see what else has been said. - Michael Narciso
I agree with you. This is a strategic blunder. Curious to see if this clips Twitter's wings or if it's got Phoenix on it's side. - phil baumann
@roger you thoughtfulness is very much appreciated - I still wrestle with posting a comment on a blog or adding to the comment stream on FF. Not a big deal in my case - I am eager to learn, share and interact and love having the blog to log thoughts that take up more room than a FF comment box but my fascinations are far too broad to develop a focussed topic theme necessary to really build a core of readers so I don't worry about it too much. @michael none taken at all - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
the followers migrate to the same people here. if you cultivated fans you won't lose them - Noah David Simon
Marco thanks for the post. As a user who has not "invested" much in twitter and actually only signed on due to Friendfeed, I'm very interested in how this plays out. Problems aside, the overall concept of twitter as a web/mobile/aim service is a great one that doesn't have a true (even ident.ca) competitor as far as I can tell. - Jon-Paul Bussoli
@Hutch yeah I have been a bit Trolly the last couple days. Don't know why. On this though I just get a bit 'protect the little guy' and of course it was unfounded but a knee jerk reaction anyway. Sorry to those who felt my poor nature over the last 24hrs and thanks @Hutch for pointing it out. - Roger Kondrat
great headline ... shorter article? nice style... - Gregory Lent
@Marco I love your post really can’t comment much beyond that because it was like you took the words out of my mouth.
But I will say this when blogs first came about they were said due to trackback, and pingback to allow for the first time a fluid single conversation to occur across multiple voices. Twitter did this really well in its own way too. - Roger Kondrat
What is interesting is during the drama at Twitter everyone has focused on their pitfalls and has in my own opinion possibly missed another important factor in Twitters existence and that is the market has changed or rather is in the midst of a major transition.
Conversations are now being initiated on Twitter and Blogs but they are being aggregated elsewhere. Initially this happened with the support of bloggers through the use of Disqus, Intense Debate, but not it seems to be skipping over them and heading directly to a new kind of service altogether. - Roger Kondrat
Friendfeed and their kind (socialthing,etc) are where the micro-conversations are occurring. These sites are extending what Twitter started out doing so well but in the end it is and always will be a slow and inflexible service when compared to the new breed (FF SocialThing, etc). - Roger Kondrat
excellent post Marco...I like your approach and analysis. The last 24 hours for twitter have been devastating. I can't even begin to imagine how the staff at twitter must feel right now. But as a customer, i know how I feel - NOT happy! First they screwed up the follower/follows counts and then sent tweets with my name on them (I did NOT write those) - so the twitter database is hosed! not a good moment for twitter to say the least. - Susan Beebe
(1) twitter deserves what it got. forget the tech issues. they went fascist and decided to punish people for using the interface as best they could. they used a few uptight people in a mob to create a witch hunt against people who were importing feeds and had a lot of followers. They are getting exactly what I warned them about (2) they hoarded the technology and did not license it out. if they had licensed twitters technology out it would of been a very profitable standard. (more...) - Noah David Simon
(3) back to the fascist issue. they promised free thought in a public forum and they never delivered. the block concept is a stupid idea. obviously I proved that with panopticons and they went to shoot the messenger. twitter's architecture is a public forum open to any viewer. In being such it betrayed itself and created its own *CANCER* by implementing a block. This will be friendfeeds downfall in the end as well because if I want to look up Robert Scoble and see what he is up to I can. I can go and wait for Robert Scoble to post off his own comments and flame him. The best concept is if I can see it then I should be able to talk. - Noah David Simon
I agree about the importance of the subscriber functinality - Mark Dykeman
again... I believe in security. I'm not a purest, but I believe the elegance of a system should not be compromised. there are plenty of walled gardens on the internet. twitter was not supposed to be walled. ...and friendfeed isn't a good place for walls either. there are plenty of opportunities for elitism in life. despite some nut jobs, it is beneficial for there to be some free expression. people should be able to turn a thread off when they want to. We all deal with aggravations. - Noah David Simon
back to (1) and the license issue. if it had been licensed then it would of never become over populated and different flavors of a good thing would of happened. ... maybe even a version of twitter with and without block. it just seems they are guilty of trying to contain the wind. they could of owned the wind's license for a while, but they were too greedy. - Noah David Simon
@noah completely understand that there are plenty of things that need fixing - problem is that over a decent length of time a number of very unique communities have sprung up around the service - if the service dies those communities go with it - that is part of the reason for this http://tinyurl.com/5sxmzy - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
I can't remember a single service that has attracted more meta talk about itself... Twitter is not (at least should not) be a mission or business critical function to anyone -- its a social interaction vehicle... They are improving, and I'll bet in a year's time the "fail whale" will be just another internet colloquialism. - Mark Philpot
my basic point is that it failed to capture the positives of the brand name. it failed to reflect the free spirit of the community. It failed to take advantage of its strengths. instead they plaid police man... and they weren't very good at it. Their product was not like facebook (which seems harder to copy).... being simple was twitter's brilliance and it's downfall because everyone else could make one. If they had early on started encouraging other people to start their own twitter it'd b different - Noah David Simon
Barak, the show's tone was very even throughout the whole season (though there's some flashback stuff that's set in the 30s and 50s that was a bit different) so if the first 3 didn't do anything for you the rest probably won't either. The shows gets more interesting and layered for sure, but it doesn't change its spots. - David T. Cole
I think so, Barak. I had the same difficulty getting into it, but it ended up becoming one of my favorite shows. - Kevin Hessel
Thanks David and Kevin. I think given all the critical acclaim it has been getting i'll give it another couple of episodes. It does have some charm just hasn't pulled me in yet. - Barak B
David T Cole - can't tell from your comments whether you actually like it. - Barak B
I like it a lot -- I caught up on season one in about a week. :) - David T. Cole
There is room for Mad Men on FF. Feel free to join and spread the word. - Paul Denlinger
I think it's a little like Desperate Housewives for smart media people who are good at marketing themselves in the 60s. - Paul Denlinger
halfway through season 1, great show. - MG Siegler
Saw the first two episodes of Season 1 last night and I gotta say, Mad Men is an elegant show - JungleG
I'm really looking forward to Season 2. One of the best shows on TV. - David Weiner
Intro-great; Show-amazing. The level of detail they bring to the show is outstanding. - Ryan Cates
can't wait for the new season of Mad Men this Sunday. Only wish Time Warner had AMC in HD where I live. - Alan Wages
The best intro EVER for me is Six Feet Under -- but I agree, Mad Men has a great intro (and it's a great show) - JungleG
Haunting, simple, stark, unsettling. It's one of the few openings I never FF through. It captures the dark sense of dread that underlies the show. Brilliant touch that the agency is pimping Nixon. (FF = fast forward, not friendfeed) - Michael Markman
Yeah, I thought it had the best pilot for a TV show I've seen in years. Been hooked since (thank goodness for downloadable TV). And I still think Carnivale had the best intro ever. - Noah Mittman
Ryan, if you're really looking for best intro ever, I'll say it's a tie between Get Smart and Lavern and Shirley. - Michael Markman
Hail to the King, baby! Great instructional video, I learned a lot. Still, quitting blogging cold turkey sounds kind of painful -- does anyone know if there's any patch I can wear or gum I can chew to gradually cut down on blogging? - Karim
I thought it was funny, but then I got the subtext of what he was taking the piss out of. - Duncan Riley
waht subtext? it was supposed to be funny based on jason's quitting blogging - that's all. - Allen Stern
Plus other video tours of the New York Times. - Robert Scoble
This was actually released a while back, but it guess it has since been pulled (until tomorrow apparently). Either way, it's really, really slick. - William Couch
something to remember when we f-up. of course hindsight is when we actually appreciate it...never upon impact. btw, enjoyed your open file slides. - Kevin Dugan
I love that 'evil' is followed by 'god' rather than 'good'. - Kevin Fox
it's kind of amazing how overall positive the google tags are. - Jess Lee
It's pretty fun browsing some of the brands. The survey population is a little bit skewed :) Here's the one for Penguin Books: http://www.brandtags.net/brows... - Simon
If you were FriendFeed and were to buy Microsoft or Google, which do you buy? - Kevin Fox
@Louis From the guy who markets hardware! Twitter doesn't need more hardware. They need new architecture and my bet is that they lack the cojones to start over. - Cyndy
Kevin's question is a lot more relevant. The answer is Google. Always buy the company that's on the upswing, not the one that's yesterday's tech. - Louis Gray
A microsoft twitter will sends oodles to pownce - Dan Rockwell via twhirl
FriendFeed at least has a shot at an advertising model that makes sense. Twitter does not. - Robert Seidman