VentureBeat

Anyone who read the comment’s on yesterday’s post, Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble, will know that blogger Robert Scoble was not too happy that Twitter seemed to be placing some of the blame for its woes on the “popular” users such as himself. (For the record, Twitter never explicitly mentioned Scoble’s name, but it is fairly obvious that Scoble is perhaps the most server-straining of the popular users, see Dave Winer’s Twitter Spewage list for more on that.)

Today, armed with his Nokia N95 mobile video phone and the power of live streaming video service Qik, Scoble invaded the Twitter offices to get answers. The video, embedded below, shows Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone being very open about some of Twitter’s most recent issues. As we’ve said before, this newfound transparency is definitely a good thing.

From the outset of the video it’s very clear that Williams in particular wants Scoble to know that they are not blaming him for the service’s woes — but they do seem to agree with Scoble’s own assessment that he is a burden on the system, joking even at one point that perhaps he could get his own server, where he can’t talk to anyone. Still, they correctly allude to the fact that the problem the Scoble and other power users create is their burden to fix.

For me, this blaming Scoble aspect was just a somewhat facetious approach to come at the real story, which was a discussion about some of the very real problems and misconceptions about what Twitter is facing right now. Anyone who read past the fifth paragraph will find the real meat: the discussion with Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces’ chief technology officer, about what Twitter could have possibly done differently when launching the service (hindsight is, of course, always 20/20) and what can be done now.

It’s clear from Williams and Stone’s responses in the video that a lot of what Shalom was saying was right on the money. There is no simple, quick fix for Twitter, but the team seems confident that it will be able to tackle its issues.

So don’t blame Ruby on Rails, don’t blame Robert Scoble, blame the desire to get a new kind of company off the ground quickly and not knowing if it would even pan out.

It is also interesting to note that at one point in the video Williams says Twitter hasn’t ruled out temporarily suspending new account sign-ups or possibly turning off the ability to add new friends — so sign up and follow us while you can! You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

On Monday, we covered a talk by Robert Scoble (pictured bottom) about how Google will get “its butt kicked” by companies like Facebook, Mahalo and Techmeme. We were charitable in our coverage, saying his point about using personal filters (via the “social graph) to remove spam was a solid one, though we mentioned a few big caveats.

Search expert Danny Sullivan (pictured top left) has responded to Scoble’s argument, however, and tears it to shreds. Sullivan is as lucid as anyone when it comes to search (see profile in USA Today), and we’ve been following him closely for years as a result. We’ve never seen him as worked up about something as he is in this post. Get past the emotion, though, and you’ll center on a core paragraph (see below) summing up how Google is responding to new personalized and social technologies. It’s a great piece, providing valuable insight into where search is, and where it is headed.

In particular, Google has been talking about how personalized search allows for creating personalized PageRank (and see here for a patent look), a way where rankings revolve around what you personally like. It’s not a hard leap to extend that into a “social network PageRank” model, where if you define a social network, the collective interests of that network could be used to model the rankings. Google’s not doing that now, but to suggest that the mechanism are somehow impossible from either a company attitude or technological model is simply being ignorant of Google.

updated

Robert Scoble, the tech blogger, has drawn a lot of attention with a talk about why Google is beginning to fail as a search engine, and how upstarts may eat its lunch within a few years.

It is provocatively titled Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years, and here’s first video of a series (we’ve embedded it below, after the jump).

His argument is solid for the most part. Google’s search results have deteriorated because expert marketers are increasingly gaming the popular search engine. They pay for links to make their web sites more significant in Google’s eyes, and there’s no way for Google’s algorithm to determine whether a link is paid or not.

A bunch of start-ups are using human editing filters to do a better job of sorting through what Web pages are significant and which ones are not. The best ones (TechMeme, Facebook) are aggregating thousands, even millions of people whose choices can help point to relevant information. For example, if real people at Facebook talking about me tend to link to my site, VentureBeat, well, that site will show up first when you search for my name. At Google, it doesn’t. The idea is that if you can peer into, and access all the real links made by people within Facebook, and combine it with other trust-oriented sites, you’ll have a better engine.

The start-ups haven’t yet fully harnessed the power afforded them by the people that use their services, in part because they didn’t start by wanting to solve the problem of search. They’ve happened on to it. Each of them bring different advantages and disadvantages to the game. There may be more promising that the ones that the three Scoble mentions, including Wikia’s secretive project that is underway.

Scoble says Google’s algorithm is “stuck in cement,” so elaborate and so entrenched that the big company won’t be able to adapt as quickly as small companies with less to lose using a radically different approach. Google couldn’t simply buy a competitor to help it adapt, this argument goes. It would find it too complicated to incorporate the human-filtered approach into its algorithm. Google doesn’t understand social technology, Scoble continues. Google even owns social network, Orkut, but hasn’t been able to leverage lessons learned from that experience to make Google better, he argues.

The main problem with Scoble’s argument is that the upstart companies will have trouble scaling. It is difficult — perhaps impossible — to organize humans to reliably track millions of changes that are happening all over the place ever second on the web. That’s why the upstarts may be more successful organizing efficient results for only the most popular topics, which is what Mahalo is doing. The other challenge for the upstarts is that search marketers will increasingly look for ways to came their systems too, setting up spam link-laden groups at Facebook, for example.