I’ve been a fan of Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog for awhile now. So I was a little horrified when I read today’s article “Amateur Hour Over at Twitter?” The article was about the departure of Twitter’s Chief Architect, Blaine Cook. In the article, Arrington doesn’t pull any punches, and takes Cook to task for Twitter’s scalability problems:

“Cook was directly responsible for scaling Twitter, and he very much failed in his job.”

I’ll set aside the question of whether or not this claim is even true. And I won’t even consider the legal ramifications of levying such claims. Perhaps Arrington knows a lot more about rapidly scaling realtime communications systems, and the inner-workings and politics of Twitter, Inc., than most of us do.

This amateurish outburst made me ponder the rock-star status to which we now elevate some programmers and system architects. There are a lot of geeks to whom we bestow a (perhaps unhealthy) share of idolatry, many of whom don’t even need their full names to be recognized: DHH, Guido, Linus, PG, Scoble, Spez, Steve (and his evil twin, FSJ), and, yes, even Arrington. I could probably name dozens more. Many of us pay a lot of money to be in the same room with these people, and hear them speak.

Was Blaine Cook at this level of stardom? Probably not. But he did give talks and apparently kept a blog about the challenges of scaling a project so quickly. He was Chief Architect of arguably the hottest social service on the internet. Perhaps that’s enough to become a target.

Arrington’s job is to attract eyeballs. Eyeballs sell ads and (presumably) promote speaking engagements. At its essence, TechCrunch is not that much different than a traditional magazine. From where I sit, TechCrunch gleefully taunted a guy who left his job, forceably or otherwise. What company does that put TechCrunch in when compared to traditional media? Who follows the real rock stars around, revelling in their success and revelling even more when they crash hard?

Michael Arrington needs to decide what TechCrunch is. Is it The Wall Street Journal? Or is it The Star? The tabloids at the supermarket checkout get lots of eyeballs by celebrating the latest misery of Britney or Lindsey or Brad & Angelina. If that’s what TechCrunch is selling, then I ain’t buying.

Photo Credit: Eric Mutrie

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under industry, programming, social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.