The Reluctant App-Aratchik

TechCrunch losing its bite? pic by nouveau

TechCrunch is by all means a pleasant and interesting technology read. They have the news, they have the contacts, they are right-on, righteous and they have plenty of attitude.

Founder and editor Michael Arrington is regarded by Forbes Magazine as the second most important “Web Celeb” who can “make or break” any start up and whose wrath is feared by internet scamsters and corporate cut-throats alike.

Arringtons aura and energy has very much made TechCrunch what it is, but he can also count on a team of enthusiastic contributors who make every effort to emulate the great man and support his cause.

So far, so good, but what happens should it all go wrong?

Last weekend, MG Siegler, TC staff writer, sniffed out trouble brewing with the iPhone’s Facebook App.

Users complained about blank profile pages and lack of updates. As any professional interweb hack would do, Siegler started his research engines: “Twitter searches, tips coming in” and even a “Facebook thread” on the matter convinced him there was some journalistic meat on what others might have dismissed as a simple temporary technology glitch.

To understand how this story unfolds, we need to consider that anything to do with iPhone apps is of course entangled in the entire recent ideologic direction of TechCrunch. TechCrunch, led by Arrington, are very much opposed to Apple’s App Store vetting process, which in their eyes is at best arbitrary, at worst unjust and stifling innovation.

Ideology

TechCrunch is convinced that a business model that keeps control of it’s store front must result in developer unrest, defections and creative stagnation. And as many ideology driven mantras this is self-evident and inevitable: Apple is a bad, rotten Apple and hence it will fail.

This ideological approach to the App Store and its policies unfortunately leads to a somewhat distorted world view in which there exist only heros and villains, friends and foes, freedom and slavery, issues are no longer value-free, they either confirm or oppose your worldview.

So when Siegler looked at the result of his research (Tweets and a Facebook thread, no less) he was, as any good journalist, looking for a subtext. But to be a good TechCrunch journo, ideally the subtext had to assist the TechCrunch outlook.

Technology fails or breaks down all the time, but wasn’t it possible there could be a moral lesson to be drawn from this incident? Perhaps this incident might prove that it was the indirect outcome of Apple’s dictatorial stance on app approval, the kind that TechCrunch have predicted since Arringtons epiphany and Android conversion?

Very conveniently it just so happened that the creator of the iPhone Facebook app was no other than one Joe Hewitt.

A Divine Comedy

Joe Hewitt,  who, despite his open source credentials prefers to receive a paycheck from the Facebook empire, had previously been declared an ‘iPhone God’ by the mighty Michael Arrington himself, Siegler regarded his Facebook app as a work of genius, the “most useful app on the iPhone” and “nearly perfect”.

But Hewitt is now mostly known for his outspoken stance against the App Store approval process. He quite vehemently came out on the side of the fettered and shackled developers who are reluctantly suffering the abundance of Apple’s fenced-off orchard.

Recently he had thrown down his dev tools in disgust, and had either voluntarily or under the corporate cosh, moved away from iPhone app development altogether.

Siegler then put 1 and 1 together and arrived at 17 and a half.

What if the godlike Hewitt had somehow cursed the demonic App Store and and caused the Facebook hiccups as divine revenge for many a frustrated app dev, or perhaps the mere absense of Hewitts goodwill would break his apps and expose Apple to the anger of millions of iPhone users?

The case seemed clear: Like an angry puppeteer Hewitt had cut of the strings to his creation and had left it to whither and die.

The resulting story went public on the 21st of November, just a day after the bug first appeared, and the flood gates to an allmighty public outcry opened. Twitter lit up with the re-tweets of a million hurting souls, echoing Sieglers solemn, despairing cry of “Facebook’s iPhone App Is Broken. Who Will Fix It?”

Panic

Alerted by Siegler’s panic stricken article and the reaction it had caused, and keen to keep TechCrunch sweet, Facebook representitives hurriedly despatched communiqués, assuring all was well and a ‘team of engineers’ was dealing with the issue. But that did little to persuade Siegler.

On the contrary, it roused in him even greater despair. So in a hasty addendum he vented his doubts: “How many Facebook developers does it take to fix an app? We’ll find out, I guess. The answer should be one: Hewitt. But sadly, that’s not the case anymore.”

Yes, sadly the life giving entity that was Hewitt had been replaced by a faceless team of engineers, and what had once been whole had been smitten into many tiny pieces and nobody would ever be able to put it all together again.

In the meantime, comments appeared, confirming that it was not only the iPhone which was affected–Android and Blackberry users experienced similar problems. Facebook again tried to signal to Siegler that his take on the issue might be misguided: “this is the result of a backend Platform API issue, not the iPhone app. We are pushing a fix shortly.”

But even at that point Siegler was not prepared to abandon his moribund mission, and he certainly wasn’t going to listen to his readers nor the corporate lackeys. Despite all evidence to the contrary he insisted: “That sounds like an iPhone app problem to me”.

Eventually TechCrunch demi-god Hewitt himself felt it was time to intervene and put the story straight: “The FB API has glitches from time to time which break not just the iPhone app, but every app that builds on it, from Blackberry to Seesmic.”

Siegler still didn’t feel it was time to admit his bloggers tantrum was nothing but mindless drivel, and rather than seeing the funny side of his allmighty cock-up, he blamed his confusion squarely on the iPhone: “So I’ll guess we’ll just chalk up all the iPhone-only complaints to the fact that it’s so popular.”

Lack of research and jumping the gun had nothing to do with it…

There is a clear problem with TechCrunch: Just like any organisation that punches way above their weight they start to believe their own hype and as a result become incapable of self inspection and loose all perspective. When Arrington started out his astuteness seemed par for the course and appropriate for an ambitious rabble-rouser–cute even.

But now, with his influence and connections Arrington and his TechCrunch cronies need to make twice as sure that they don’t publish trite trash for the sake of a few million extra, short term, page impressions. They need to practice what they preach. With power comes responsibility, so they must get their stories right or put them right if they don’t.

Some sources:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/21/facebook-iphone-app-broken/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/23/interview-with-facebooks-joe-hewitt-iphone-god/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-facebooks-massively-popular-iphone-app-quits-the-project/

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Tags: App Store, Apple, facebook, iPhone, joe hewitt, MG Siegler, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is filed under AppStore, Apple, News, Social Networking, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.