
Flipboard failure: Why are reviews ignoring the problems? - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/business/114998/flipboard-failure-why-are-reviews-ignoring-problems
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dlokshin
Not surprised at all that few people are talking about the problems that
Fliboard is having. Most of the people reviewing are early adopting techies
(Scoble, techcrunch). They understand the and are forgiving of the problems
that come with launching as a startup (think of Twitter or Mint). They care
much more about the product and whether or not it has value in their daily
lives. Seems they're unanimously agreeing that it does in fact hold value.

~~~
Farimani2
Well that would be ok if it were slow or worked most of the time. It just
doesn't work! Anyway, it's a decent product but not a big deal. The main issue
is that technical journalism has stopped being journalism and has become a
slave to the PR ecosystem. Journalism is a cornerstone of a free society and
unfortunately, at least when it comes to reporting on technical products and
services, it's controlled by PR programs. Flipboard is not a 2 man garage
startup. It raised 10+M to write a page flipping UI. They did a great job of
their PR launch though!

~~~
eli
Would you still read a technical publication that _never_ got early press
releases (so was always a day late to big announcements) or reviewer devices
because they spat on all the PR flaks?

~~~
Farimani2
eli, no i wouldn't. but the coverage on this product is imbalanced for a
product that isn't working yet. PR is good and necessary.

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minalecs
I think if you're saying its a fail, because they couldn't handle traffic
based on their press release then this is not a fail. This is actually a great
validation for them , that people are interested in their product.

On the other hand if you read about how they are scraping content, and
possibly violating copyright of other sites.. then this could be an issue.

~~~
smackfu
It seems fairly similar to a new website launch that crashes under the
traffic. Sure you have eyeballs but they just think "oh yeah, that thing is
junk" and _tell everyone that_.

The only advantage for an app is that people might still have it downloaded
when they want to try it again. If they don't delete it immediately (and rate
it 1 star in the popup).

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illumin8
Actually, this angst about the app not working might be better directed
towards Twitter, who throttles API connections to maintain performance.
Flipboard can't help it that the demand of users that want to receive tweets
through their app is higher than Twitter allows.

This article should have just said "twitter fails" and it would be more
accurate.

~~~
camwest
I think this is more about the fact that Flipboard processes the tweets on
their own servers. I don't think the twitter api throttling is a factor.

~~~
illumin8
I see. The message I got from Flipboard app made it sound like they had
exceeded their time-based quota of Twitter API traffic, but it makes sense
that perhaps it is the Flipboard servers that are getting too much traffic.

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thenduks
I don't get the problem. The app is great, they are having launch/growing
pains. That much is true, to be sure, but would you write an article about how
great twitter is and then be sure to write _but I occasionally get the fail-
whale!_? I don't think so, it dates your article severely and isn't really
relevant to the quality of the product.

Next week (or soon, anyway) things will smooth out. Review the app on it's
functionality/style/etc not on the short-comings of it's server
infrastructure. The latter is a detail that can be fixed pretty easily while
the former is pretty permanent.

~~~
Terretta
> _Review the app on it's functionality/style/etc not on the short-comings of
> it's server infrastructure. The latter is a detail that can be fixed pretty
> easily while the former is pretty permanent._

Was this missing a "/sarcasm"?

This seems like the most recklessly harmful remark I've read on Hacker News in
ages.

Ideas are easy; implementation—especially in iron—is hard. It matters, and
it's exponentially harder post launch.

> _would you write an article about how great twitter is and then be sure to
> write but I occasionally get the fail-whale!? I don't think so, it dates
> your article severely and isn't really relevant to the quality of the
> product_

Mashable would, two days ago, on 21 July 2010:

<http://mashable.com/2010/07/21/twitter-scalability/>

To quote this "severely dated" article:

> _"[Twitter] must first and most importantly achieve an acceptable uptime
> ratio. All the partnerships, revenue and media buzz in the world can fall a
> bit flat when the app itself doesn’t work."_

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thenduks
I think you're taking a bit of a leap with what I said. I'm not saying it's
only the idea that is important at all, I'd be the first to argue that ideas
are actually worth next to nothing by themselves. What I was trying to say was
that their idea and their implementation are solid -- specifically I'm saying
the part of the implementation that counts is solid. Server infrastructure
problems are a minor detail compared to the app itself IMO.

And to the last part about the mashable article... I would absolutely say that
article is 'severely dating' itself. Twitter isn't going anywhere (again IMO)
and some server problems aren't going to change that. In a year that article
will be a slightly less embarrassing "no one will ever need more than 640k of
memory" piece of writing.

