Crying Out Loud — The Feed Crier Blog

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington laments the traffic spikes that a writeup in TechCrunch often causes.

As TechCrunch traffic continues to grow, a problem is popping up more and more often - the traffic we send to a site when we write about it on its launch day can (and often does) take it down. It’s not that TechCrunch traffic is that massive, but it’s enough that if there’s a bug somewhere in application that wasn’t noticed with small traffic testing, it can be exploited and quickly take the site down. The last week, we’ve averaged one site down per day.

Feed Crier was featured before we were ready for the traffic. We’d done some early testing with a few users and opened up the service to the public quietly hoping to pick up a new user a day or so. The slow initial growth would help us gauge what still needed doing. We were in a learning phase, still figuring out how to scale (there’s not much info out there on how to scale instant messaging bots).

TechCrunch found us about 12 hours after we took the wraps off and wrote us up on a Saturday night. I wasn’t concerned — we were only picking up about 15 visitors an hour from TC. Very early Monday morning I got on a plane for Seattle, and when I got off, I found that traffic had skyrocketed, the bot had crashed several hours previously and all that TC traffic was for nothing. Bummer.

In our case, it was a bug that crashed the bot. It didn’t handle subscriptions to URLs that didn’t exist very well. We knew that, but our early tests were controlled enough that it wasn’t a big concern right then.

I don’t know the right solution for your end. A separate site won’t help — you’ll end up with a similar readership and similar traffic patterns. Asking or warning each site before you write about them may help a bit, but until the traffic hits they probably have no idea if they’ll be able to handle it. Trial by fire. If you take the time to contact each site first, you also may lose out on scoops due to the delays you’ll be imposing in your publishing.

My advice to startups is to grow your load carefully if you are uncertain that you can handle it. Manage the signup process by placing limits on active users, or even blocking public signups altogether. Take names and contact info of interested parties and then give them access in smaller groups. Putting up that gatekeeper will reduce your signups, but most of the users you’ll lose are the drive-by signups anyway. Most of the seriously interested parties will stick around.

Feed Crier has had one long outstanding bug that’s driven me nuts. If a feed had multiple new items, only the newest one would be sent to you. If Bob’s Puppy Auctions posted 5 new puppies at once, you’d only see the newest one. If your best friend posted 10 new links to their Del.icio.us account, only the last one would appear in your IM.

All that’s changed now. The bug has been squashed. Feed Crier will now make sure you know about every last item the moment they become available.

And we’re really sorry you lost out on the Shih Tzu auction.

Brad Feld tells how he reads feeds…

I subscribe to 734 feeds. Until a few weeks ago (when I started using NewsGator Desktop), I fired up FeedDemon once a day, spent 30 minutes going through all my unread items, forwarding and clipping as appropriate, and then not looking at my feeds again until the next morning.

Of these 734 feeds, there are 50 of them that I want to see whenever someone posts. … I now have a notifier that pops up every 15 minutes (that’s about the right periodicity for me) that shows any posts in the past 15 minutes from this list of 50. … When someone writes something interesting that has real time relevance, I can react to it.

Brad’s using NewsGator Desktop to do this, but his description is pretty much exactly how I use Feed Crier.

I have hundreds of feeds in my reader and I check them a couple of times a day. And then there are the 30 feeds that I want immediately, everything from good friend’s blogs, to alerts from various server monitors, to high-volume feeds that I just watch to keep a my finger on the pulse. And of course, Woot.

Update 2 (9:56pm): The MSN bot is still unable to connect to MSN’s servers. We’re investigating and will get the MSN bot back online as soon as possible.

Update: As of 7:50pm PST, the servers are back online. ServerBeach attributes the problem to a faulty switch in their San Antonio facility.

ServerBeach is a dedicated hosting provider that’s popular among the web 2.0 crowd. Companies like Automattic, TailRank, YouTube, Dogster, and MyBlogLog all have servers there*. That’s where Feed Crier’s servers are, and several other startups I’m involved in are there too.

Starting this morning, Feed Crier started behaving oddly. A few minutes ago, all the bots went offline. The front page of the Web site stopped showing the blog items, essentially meaning that the page can’t find the blog’s RSS feed. I can see the feed. I can log into the Jabber server. But applications on Feed Crier’s servers can’t find other Feed Crier servers.

What’s more the server can’t do DNS lookups on sites like security.debian.org, even though those servers are obviously up and running.

I headed over to Server Beach to report the problem, and I got this:

Until these issues are resolved, expect some intermittent uptime from Feed Crier.

(* Or did in the past. I would imagine that YouTube has been moved to Google’s datacenters and MyBlogLog is probably moving as well.)

Joel Spolsky has some great tips on providing customer service. I’d like to add one more.

Customer service is the job of everyone in the company.

That includes the CEO, the sales guys, and the developers. Everyone should have some contact with the customer, because that’s how you learn. Some of Feed Crier’s best features have come from customers. Something they asked that gave me an idea, for instance.

No one is too important or too busy to talk to customers. And you know what? Customers love it. They love it when their question is answered by a real person, with a real name. They love it when they find out they’re talking to the VP of sales or one of the developers, or even the accountant. It makes them feel special and important.

So far out of all the people that have signed up for Feed Crier Pro, only one has left. I sent that one a personal email thanking them for subscribing and asking what I could do to win his business back. And I’ll do that for everyone. Every subscriber that leaves, I’ll ask why.

If you want to tell me how much and in exactly which ways I suck, I welcome that. Shoot me an email at adam [@t] feedcrier.com. Send an IM to feedcrierhelp on AIM or on Jabber at my email address. Heck, my cell phone number is even posted over on my personal blog, if you feel the need to go that far.

Unfortunately I can only email the Pro subscribers. That’s because those are the only Feed Crier users that I have an email address for. But I promise, if you’re a Pro subscriber and you leave, I’ll send you a note. Feel free to test me by signing up for a Pro account and canceling after a few months. Or a few years. I’m not picky.

Feed Crier now supports real-time alerting to MSN Messenger addresses. Whether you use the MSN client or Windows Live Messenger, whether your signin ID is yourname@hotmail.com or yourmail@yourdomain.com, Feed Crier can now deliver alerts to your desktop.

Feel free to try out MSN support by using the signup form or by sending the word “help” in an instant message to feedcrier@feedcrier.com. We’re testing the stability and uptime of the MSN bot right now, so don’t be alarmed if you see a bit of downtime.

Feed Crier can now deliver alerts to any Jabber server, including Google Talk and many corporate instant messaging platforms.

Jabber support has been in beta for several weeks. Thanks so much to the valuable feedback that our beta testers have given over this time period.

The new support was soft launched on Monday, but we’ve withheld making any sort of announcement while we worked out the post-beta kinks. One known issue remaining is that Trillian users will experience a nasty-sounding security alert when clicking on a link in a Feed Crier alert. We’re working to get this corrected quickly.

Simon Willison argues in favor of clear URLs and ensuring that each piece of content on your server has only one URL. Even if the content at two different URLs is identical, machines see them as two separate resources and will treat them as such. This means that caches frequently store two copies of the same data and cache hit rates are reduced, costing you extra bandwidth and your site visitors extra download times.

Simon says…

Social link sharing sites such as del.icio.us can’t accurately aggregate links to the same resource. That … should catch your attention if you care about effectively promoting your site. Here’s a random example, plucked from today’s del.icio.us popular.

• http://www.convinceme.net/ has 36 saves
• http://www.convinceme.net/index.php has 148 saves
• http://convinceme.net/ has 211 saves
• http://convinceme.net/index.php has 38 saves

Combined that’s 433 saves; much more impressive, and more likely to end up at the top of a social sharing sites.

And you’re probably hosting content at multiple URLs without even realizing it. If you have www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com pointing at the same content, you have two URLs. Even if you allow both yoursite.com/SomePage/ and yoursite.com/somepage/ then you have two URLs for that page.

When one of your readers adds a feed into Feed Crier with www.yoursite.com/feed.xml and someone else adds it as yoursite.com/feed.xml Feed Crier sees these as two different feeds and will check each of the feeds. This can give you inaccurate subscriber counts, and adds to the load that Feed Crier places on your server, not to mention the load it places on Feed Crier’s indexing bots.

To alleviate this problem, we monitor the content of feeds being subscribed to. If two of them have identical content, they’re flagged for review. A human editor compares each feed that’s been flagged to determine if they really are the same feed. If so, we mark one feed as the real one and the others as duplicates. This way, no matter what URL someone uses for your site, we’re grabbing the right one.

Of course, all this would be easier if you didn’t have duplicate URLs.

Forget all that standing in line and camping overnight to get yourself a Wii. Outtastock has a Wii Finder that scours online merchants looking for this rare and elusive creature. They’ve got a feed that will even let you get availability updates in your favorite feed reader.

You check your feed reader and discover that a Wii is available. That sweet taste of victory quickly turns to sour defeat and disappointment. That Wii sold out two hours ago. If only you would have known the moment the Wii became available.

Those are some fantastic and smart folks over at Outtastock. And we’re not just saying that because they like Feed Crier. They’re smarter and fantistic-er because they put a simple link to Feed Crier on their buying tips page.

They say…

If you don’t use a news/rss reader, you can still take advantage of the Wii Finder Feed by using Feed Crier to send the updates to your instant messenger (desktop client, mobile phone, you get the idea). Heck, even if you do use a news reader, using Feed Crier to send feed updates to your IM is still cool. BTW, the feed only changes when a Wii becomes available, so Feed Crier works for this purpose perfectly.

Those clever kids.

But enough about us, let’s talk about you.

By putting that simple link on their site, Outtastock became the second most subscribed feed in Feed Crier overnight. That link went up, and BAM! People started subscribing.

If you want to increase your readership, get people commenting on your blog, and become the talk of the town, stick a Feed Crier subscription widget on your site. It only takes a second and can mean a lot to your site.

So there you have it, proof that making it easy for your readers to get real time IM alerts of your feed will make you smarter and more attractive to the opposite sex.

P.S. Want to get your Wii? Subscribe to that Outtastock feed with this simple link.

Lots of people are using Feed Crier to keep an eye on fast-changing news sites like Digg and Tailrank. But Feed Crier’s update mechanism treated all feeds equally. This meant that a subscriber to Digg might not be the first to hear about the latest Apple Phone rumor. His friends would laugh at him for not having seen the video of someone solving a Rubik’s cube with his feet.

But no more.

Feed Crier is getting smart. Almost as smart as my 11-year-old son. Because when you turn 11 you suddenly know everything. Just ask him. Feed Crier will now learn which feeds are updated often and push them to the head of the line. Let’s see a smarty-pants 6th grader do that.

Feed Crier will try and match it’s update schedule to the feed’s actual posting schedule. If a feed updates every 5 minutes, Feed Crier will be there, waiting for an update. Every 10 minutes, we’ve got you covered. Every 10 seconds? Well, you’re on your own there. To help save you from terminal ADD Feed Crier’s only going to update you on a feed every 60 seconds, tops. We’re watching out for your health. Get outside, enjoy a little sunshine. You’re welcome.