Dear Mozilla...

So, it's almost completely over between me and Firefox. It's completely unstable now, crashing constantly when it's not locking up and running away with the CPU. The crashing is plug-in related; every Flash video crashes the browser at the end.

Chrome is completely stable and gives me no problems whatsoever. I really would rather use Firefox-- Firebug still gives superior information to Chrome's "developer mode," for one thing-- but until this is resolved I can't with good conscience.

Bleah

Why the press sucks, example MMCLXVII

Mashable today published a completely ordinary article entitled "The Truth About the Average Twitter User" with some of that ridiculous and hyberbolic verbage [sic] I've come to expect from Internet media.

Here are the important conclusion, broken into simple points:

• 1/3 of all the people who sign up for twitter never post a single tweet. We have no idea if they signed up to read, or what. But they never post
• 3/4 of all the people who signed up for twitter have posted 10 tweets or less
• Less that 1/5 of Twitter users could be considered "active."

From this, the Ric Romero at Mashable concludes:

"Power users dominate."

Well, you could have knocked me over with a Chuck Norris roundhouse, but not much else. Everyone who's ever run a social networking site, even something as trivial as a forum, knows what Ben Parr is breathlessly describing is big bold letters. (Sorry, am I using my powers for evil there?) The less the weight for signing up for anything, the more people you'll get to sign up who will never again do anything with it. I'm sure there are several dozens of places across the Intertubes where I've signed up for something, looked a couple of times, and never come back because it didn't offer me anything I didn't already have through LiveJournal, Wordpress, or Flickr. Twitter's weight is the lightest of all-- after you sign up there's no obligation and you don't even get emails when you're away for a while.

Every website operator knows that users inevitably settle into the power curve. There's no getting around it. Twitter is so spectacularly ordinary that the only thing that surprises me is that Mashable thought it worthy of posting an article along the lines of the sky is blue and water is wet.

Still, I'm not worried. Nobody will read it anyway.

For his sins, Ben Parr is consigned to reading Clay Shirky's "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality," in which Clay explains in language far more effective than mine why Ben needs to do more research before posting.