Two quick thoughts on TweepML launch amp; OAuth
Thought 1: Never announce your product at 4PM Pacific Time.
I sent email to bloggers at around 4PM and to friends shortly after. The first few blog posts started to roll in around 4:30 (Brier Dudley of Seattle Times was the first), and a lot of them only happened at 5:30–6:00PM. Who reads blogs at those hours? Well, a lot of people actually (particularly in Asia), but it’s about 5 times less people than those who read it between 10:00AM and 2:00PM. Also, we made it to TechMeme at around 11:00 PM last night until early this morning. Ugh!
I knew this, so why did I do it like that? First of, I knew we would hit some volume related bugs and I didn’t want too many users at once. Second, I had several meetings today that would keep me away from my Dev machine and I didn’t want all the hell breaking lose while I was away. So last night, after launching TweepML I had dinner with my kids and when I went back home I stayed until 11:30PM non-stop fixing bugs and improving the UX. I’m felling pretty god right now about the stability of the system.
Thought 2: OAuth is a bad user experience
A lot of people will disagree with me, but I make a case why OAuth is good for Twitter, but not good for your applications end-user. Read it at the TweepML blog.
