Pivot Invitation system is bad
First the invite is an installation code. As Microsoft says “This code is good for 10 installs – give it to 9 friends and keep 1 for yourself!” I have nothing against a code for a single use. However, this is not practical at all to invite other people because they can themselves redistribute the code! Invites by email, like Google does with Google Wave are way better.

Microsoft is unfair with Firefox (OK, it is not new)
Then, let’s install Pivot. Another bad thing, the installer says “Firefox must be closed. Click Next to close Firefox and proceed”. It does not say a thing about Internet Explorer though. Unfair treatment by Microsoft, as usual… (I am not speaking about compatibility with Linux…).

Pivot installer is bad
Worst, this code does not work. Once I use it, I get: “We were unable to verify your code at this time. Make sure you are connected to the internet and click back to try again”

Microsoft customer support is nonexistent
I emailed Jenn Lin who sent me the invitation: no answer. I tweeted livelabs and Jenn Lin: no answer. OK, they got only 2 hours (working hours in Seattle). But Twitter is real-time isn’t it?
[EDIT] See their answer at the end.

Microsoft is awful at being user friendly
I went back to Pivot website to see what I had missed. And indeed I had missed the small characters:

• “Pivot is supported only on US English-based operating systems with US English date and time formats.” I am French using Windows in… French. So I assume that is the problem. But I cannot say the way the software fails is nice. It is not clear at all what the problem is. A message like “sorry this software requires an US English-based operating system” would have been better.

• “Pivot requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Internet Explorer 8. Pivot will import your browsing history from Internet Explorer and Firefox during installation.” OK I have that but it is not the sense of history which is to be cross-browser and cross OS, (I know I am speaking about Microsoft).

• “Windows XP is not supported at this time. Pivot is not compatible with Windows Server Editions.” So even your fellow Windows users are screwed if they don’t have the version you want them to have. Gosh and I am not speaking about Linux.

• Recommended System Configuration: Windows 7 with Aero enabled, 2-GHz 32-bit (x86) processor, 2 gigabytes of random access memory. I comply with that but wow that is light… Why not a Xeon with 10Gb of RAM while you are at it.

Conclusion
So to sum up, Google Wave is easy-to-use, accessible for the world, fast, cross browser, cross OS, not requiring a monster of a computer, and has an effective invitation system while Microsoft Pivot is complicated, US-only, single browser, single OS, requiring a hell of a computer and has a poor invitation system.

I am not a Google fan boy. Do you remember when I posted that Google was spamming by paper mail or when I wrote about Google and Microsoft revenues per employee. I am neither a Microsoft hater even though I am a Linux user. I switch back and forth according to my needs. Moreover, I love data, data mining and visualization, I was excited by Pivot (as this tweet says) and ready to make a good post about it. But finally after trying Google Wave and trying to try Pivot, I must admit I am closer to be a Google fan and closer to be a Microsoft hater. I was willing to spread Pivot by spreading the invites like I did with Google Wave but, as you understand, I won’t.

[EDIT] So after 9 hours I got this answer: “I am sorry you are seeing this error. Pivot has very limited configuration support, and both the language and date time settings must be standard English-US.”
This still leaves me with the following thought. Releasing this, even in beta on invitation, is still weird with such a limited support. I mean the fact that MS is not able to make a software that works for any Windows language at the very least is really not serious. They are the ones making Windows! They should get a sens of the image they give to the world because right now I got an idea of very bad software engineers!

[EDIT 2] Here is a second answer from MS. “Perhaps you missed this detail. There is a work around for machines with configurations other than our supported set. It is not recommended for everyone, but it will get Pivot going. It is up to you if you would like to try it.” The work around can be found on Pivot Forum.

This calls for a few more comments (sent back to MS):

• Actually, I had seen that. But I don’t like much when it comes to run around your PC and make the rain dance to get a software to work (even though I am a Linux user ;-) ).
• The title of the previous link is “Non English-US installation failures - looks like a network error ” Nonsense, isn’t it?
• Now my interest about MS Pivot has been diverted from a technical question to a marketing question. I don’t understand why you have these difficulties but I don’t care much. Where I would be interested to get an answer is how they can dare to distribute (even on invites) a product with such a ridiculous support without at least an explicit help inside the software?

That being said, I don’t really expect an answer from them because marketing questions are not discussed publicly (not only at Microsoft). So, maybe, they will discuss this internally and that is enough as far as I am concerned.

Twitter is sending digital real time signals

Twitter is real time, you get a news as soon as it happens, you get someone’s thought as soon as it is formulated. Twitter sends Signals (or stream or flow) because the set of thoughts is not static, you can easily process it (like in Digital Signal Processing) or filter it. For instance you can make a search on a keyword, AF447 for instance. Thus you are filtering all the tweets for this word. Using the advanced search you can also filter for the language and a couple of other parameters. Twitter is about signals because their digital public interface (API) is very well done so you can generate automatically a tweet for instance from a blog post (eg using twitterfeed) or from a social bookmarking application. You can also export your twitter stream to your blog (you can see mine live on the right sidebar of this blog).
Thanks to CNN and others, live news has existed for a while but with twitter it has become digital. That is to say it is directly accessible to your computer. A tweet is often accompanied by a link and this link can de directly clicked. If you hear a news on CNN and want more information, you need to go to your pc, make a search and then follow the link. Quite a long process for a young person in the XXIst century! CNN has quickly understood the interest of twitter so they got rapidly an account and it is now the second most followed account. Do not ask me who is the first one I have never heard of that guy except for twitter related questions.
Real time is so fashionnable and important that it is going to be the theme of Techcrunch CrunchUp and Le Web conferences this year.

Twitter uses Telepathy

Do you know that telepathy exists? Twitter invented it. This is important. I actually think that this point is the one that explains the success of Twitter. It is the secret of Twitter! When you think or say to a friend “Techcrunch is a great blog” or “I love Twitter” Techcrunch or Twitter will never know you thought about them. Even if you publish a post, they won’t know you spoke about them so kindly, unless you send them so much traffic they notice it or unless you use trackbacks. With Twitter, telepathy is possible. You tweet your thought, that is you write “@Techcrunch is a great blog” and here you are. Because of the simple @, Techcrunch received a “reply” and thus they are aware you spoke about them. Preceding a word with a # also allows you to point out this word for the hashtags service.

By the way this gives me the idea that it could be interesting to make a generalized trackback system where each time you mention someone (and not only an article) in a blog post it sends a ping on a special page of the person’s blog, a “they speak about me” page for instance.

Twitter is about making new friends

You often make new friends by talking to people with whom you share some common interests. It is the same on twitter and it is more pronounced than on Facebook. On Facebook you are more or less supposed to add as friend people you already know. You are also supposed to use some real name. It is not the case on Twitter, you have a pseudo and you can follow who you want, in general the reason is based on some common interest you share with the other twitterer.

Twitter is a really easy stream aggregation service

You probably already read a bunch of RSS streams (1), with Twitter you can blend all the rss streams in one chronologically ordered stream.

A few things I hate

Let’s see now the things I hate about Twitter.

Website is very poor

On the twitter website you cannot make groups, you cannot manage several accounts. You are limited to 10 searches. You cannot have a multi column display. To have all these things working you need a twitter client. There are a bunch of them:

• TweetDeck The one I prefer for its simplicity, its interface, its fastness.
• Twhirl very useful when you want to deal with several accounts simultaneously but maintaining a strict separation between accounts.
• Seesmic Desktop is good to merge several Twitter accounts and also Facebook accounts. The interface looks good but the client is still in beta. And for some reasons it is slow and buggy (2) on my Linux 64 bits. It will be a must once it is possible to manage separately several accounts and once it is faster. That is when Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop will be merged. Indeed both are made by Seesmic.
• Statuzer There is a promising conversation view.
• DestroyTwitter and Spaz: Simple twitter clients.

Way of Managing groups is awkward

It is very easy to manage searches but I have not found very easy ways to manage groups of people you follow: On TweetDeck you can easily add people to a group. Starting from a group you have a list of people you want to add to that group. But you cannot easily add a person to several groups. Starting from a person there is no option to add it to groups. On Seesmic Desktop it is exactly the opposite! Groups do not exist on Twitter so you must recreate them for each client you use. Obviously nobody will do that. So I am still waiting for an awesome Twitter client.

Twitter website is often deadly slow

Obviously they never anticipated their success. So they are “following” their success. They need to improve their infrastructure.

There is no advanced filtering

It is not easy to filter search results by language. In clients you can’t. The only thing you can do is using Twitter advanced search. You cannot subscribe to the tweets of someone, filtered by language. For instance if someone tweets in English and French you cannot only get the English Tweet. That is why I created 2 accounts one in English and one in French.

Dealing with several accounts is a pain

It is a pain even with Twhirl or Seesmic Desktop because you often need to go to the website (for advanced search for instance) and the website does not allow you to be connected with several accounts on several pages (like too many websites by the way, this is due to the web session management by cookies…).
I would have preferred to have one account and having people able to follow only my French tweets or English tweets or both.

Spam

Twitter is awfully spammed. It is the new heaven for spammers. Fortunately Topify helps you quickly knowing if a new follower is a spammer. But it is not yet a full antispam. I would like to have a software preventing spammers to follow me based on word analysis or simply based on a black list.

Twitter is a time sinkhole

You can spend hours on Twitter, not even noticing it. One reason is because there is no night on twitter. At any time you can find interesting people chatting about things you love. Another reason is as the website is poor, you will need a special application for anything you want to do (140+ apps). So you will spend a lot of time configuring twitter for your blog, for your RSS stream etc. If you want a Top 10 of Most Popular Twitter Applications, here is one.

Conclusion

After Google and Facebook, Twitter is the new internet revolution. So join the Twittersphere and follow me!

H
[EDITED My Twitter name is now @Fractalharry and finally I will stick to only one account to tweet in French and English]
@Fractalharry
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/harry.seldon (Go to http://www.facebook.com/username if you want to set up your own Facebook url)
RSS

(1) RSS streams about Ruby on Rails for instance. Notice that about all the guys mentionned in this post are on twitter so you can also follow them.
(2) I weirdly lose the first column sometimes. That is the column is there but empty while it should not.
(3) twittersphere 124000 results on google, twittosphere 95100 results, tweetosphere 5580 results. Which one do you prefer?

Morover it is a common subject on forums : ubuntuformums or unbuntu-fr.

So Finally if you like getting well organized windows, vote for the idea on brainstrom :

H

PS I love brainstorm which is much like what I wanna do for Thinkosphere. First time I learnt about brainstorm I was searching on vote not on ubuntu !

For most of us it was an opportunity to learn more about launchpad and its bug tracking system. Those like me who did not have an account on Launchpad created one. Then we helped sorting bugs for instance adding the package related to the bug. Christophe gave us this link to directly go to the bugs needing packaging. He also showed us how to forward a bug to the original developpers of the package (upstream process) and finally we learnt about the translation process on launchpad.

This was a cool party and an opportunity to meet the ubuntu community in toulouse. Thanks Christophe.