Archive for February 29th, 2008

YouTube Confirms Live Streaming for 2008


Via Read/Write/Web (”YouTube Launching Live Video This Year, Chen Confirms“, 28 February 2008):

“YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has confirmed that the service will use Google’s vast resources to launch live streaming functionality this year, according to a video interview on Sarah Meyer’s new show Pop17.”

This is definitely a story to keep an eye on. With YouTube slated to enter the rapidly crowding live streaming niche later this year, currently populated by the likes of Yahoo! Live and Ustream.tv, the field is going to top out extremely quickly and will give new players virtually no chance to compete.

As I discussed earlier this month, the demands of a live streaming service are extensive and can require a substantial amount of hardware to support adequately. Yahoo showed us all the downside of under-resourcing when their inaugural launch caved under the pressure.

The RWW article did not go into much detail on the specifics, so very few conclusions can be drawn based on the information currently available. Nonetheless, YouTube Live Streaming does seem to be on the cards for this year. And if anyone has the resources to make this live streaming work on a vast scale, it’s them.

Update: TechCrunch just posted about this as well (Confirmed: Live Video On YouTube This Year“), and their entry is worth a look as it outlines the current applications in the live streaming field.

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Friday, February 29th, 2008

web communication No Comments

Crazy Twitter: Proof of Concept of an A-Grade, Major League Twitter Stuff Up


Via @kolson29:

“here’s a video of the twitter craziness from last night http://s3.jeremybanks.ca/cr… about 1 hour ago from web“

The video is titled simply “Crazy Twitter” and what it depicts is simply astonishing. This screen capture was made during yet another Twitter meltdown last night in which users were randomly gaining access to each other’s accounts. Posts could be made, account details viewed, and passwords changed; anything was possible.

This is a security nightmare for the application to the extent you can now hear Twitter’s credibility dropping like a stone. If they don’t get their acts together they won’t be long for this world. This is an A-Grade, Major League stuff up.

Twitter desperately tried to smooth things over in a post (”Timeline Oddity Update” 27 February 2008), saying:

“Some folks experienced a more dramatic error which had them accidentally updating other people’s Twitter—this is a more serious issue which crosses into the realm of security. We took this very seriously, acted quickly, and learned from our mistake.

We hope our error didn’t put you out too much tonight. We’re pulling together the team and analyzing how we made this mistake so we can avoid this error next time.“

The implications of this bug are HUGE. I don’t care how seemingly insignificant a tool or application is, gaining access to another users account information is completely unacceptable. This borders on a “one strike and you’re out.” There will be people who delete their accounts for this. The question is how many.

Having gone back through my posts over the last few days, I do not seem to have been affected by all this. But based on the screen capture, it’s more than likely that the impact of this bug was substantial.

Twitter’s unexpected outages are an inconvenience. The fact their maintenance windows extend well past the announced endings is irritating. The fact user accounts were compromised and any one could view or change your account without you knowing is something far, far worse.

Update: Dave Winer has recently written a post titled “Guidelines for competing with Twitter” which is well worth a read.  I hope someone adopts his recommendations because I’m ready to switch; there just isn’t anything worthwhile to switch to yet.

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Friday, February 29th, 2008

social software No Comments

Edublogs.org Plagued by Outage


The last 24 hours have not been kind to Edublogs.org. James Farmer has indicated that over a period of 4 to 6 hours “a bug between the new forums features and caching caused quite a few blogs to time-out.”  This prevented some users from viewing their blogs.

[NB: My initial introduction indicated the outage lasted 24 hours.  Farmer has since clarified this is not the case.  Apologies for the misprint.]

This is a huge hit for edubloggers and some really bad press for the technology in general. While there are many really keen and switched-on educators in the blogosphere currently, many in the wider academic community have only just begun to wade into the realm.

Unexpected lengthy outages like this only serve to prolong the adoption time by painting blogs - and indeed online technology in general - as something that hasn’t matured yet and is not yet ready for widespread useage.

As someone who helps support services and applications (both large and small) at the uni level, I understand that outages like this are an unfortunate reality; but the blogging evangelist side of me cringes at the impact this may have across the sector.

Kate Olson echoed these sentiments on Reflection 2.0 (”Dependence on Web Apps” 28 February 2008):

“I believe wholeheartedly in opensource, freeware, and all the good stuff that can be done, but sometimes these glitches in otherwise great products can seriously hurt our professional image - for example: trying to do an entire workshop on how to use edublogs or wikispaces and the service is down!

…I’m in no way advocating NOT using web apps (I’m so deeply involved with them right now I couldn’t work without them!), but dealing with these issues needs to be taken into account. This is especially true when working with students who will NOT be accepting of the fact that all of their work has been lost or teaching educators new to technology about these tools - we need to be able to instill SOME confidence!”

Update: An announcement in the edublogs dashboard area just indicated:

“Apologies! - We’d like to apologise for the downtime today, a bug between the new forums features and caching caused quite a few blogs to time-out but we’ve fixed that now.”

Update: As seen in the comment area of this post, James Farm has reiterated his regrets for the problem and has provided the following correction on what I had initially reported:

“Hi Mike,

Completely agree, it was a pretty poor show by us and we’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again - it’s a typical painful side-effect of new features (like the forums) meeting old features (like the cache) for the first time in a high load environment (

Just to clarify a few things though the site wasn’t down (people could still log in and do stuff) but some users couldn’t see their blogs… I know this is as good as a ‘might as well be down’ though so no excuses.

The problems lasted between 4-6 hours.

Cheers, James”

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Friday, February 29th, 2008

blogs in education 8 Comments