Now obviously that press release wasn’t written for me. While we’ve been using Cloud 1 since it was Cloud 0.98b, I’ve never used Heroku personally nor professionally. The press release was more likely written to arm the multitude of IT Ops middle management at my former workplace, those long-removed-from-the-trenches starch suits who joyfully wade through mountains of Prince2 Project Management documentation like pigs in mud. But those guys don’t use Heroku. Sure, Salesforce.com want them to use Heroku, but those people aren’t  even remotely in the same demographic as the majority of Heroku users singing its praises in Ruby usergroups world wide for the past 3 years.

No, Salesforce, the early adopters largley responsible for Heroku’s excellent public image are mad agile. Not the Agile described in your well layed-out Activity Diagram, agile like a hyperactive mako shark on crystal meth. And you just took something they love(d), and they’re afraid you’ll break it. Obviously Salesforce.com need to drop a traditional Enterprise IT press release such as this one for their audience, but they really should have lead with something to reassure Heroku’s existing users. It screams “We got this shiny thing! Look, it’s SHINY!”. Anywhere there are mentions of this acquisition, there are comments by Heroku users regarding how they’re making plans to leave.

This isn’t like when Facebook change something and an army social media zombies rage for two days then go back to Business As Usual, Heroku’s userbase know why they like Heroku and they know what it will take to build a replacement. And you know what? They probably will.

As I watch Lachlan fetch some Scotch and wonder how much fun BarCamp with a hang over is going to be tomorrow, I must remind all challengers — Team Stoopid takes no prisoners!

The account tally quickly grew from the low teens to 50-odd, and then the server started to choke. Dreamhost were having some hiccups (their email went down at the same time), so I offered to host the 700+kb of images to lessen the load and hopefully stabilize the site. What’s the point of a parody site that times out when you try to create an account? Little did I know that those images would use approximately 5.5GB of bandwidth over the next 24 hours.

As the day progressed, traffic continued to increase and the account tally kept rising. Once it passed 500, the joke was officially a raging success. Jim was absolutely wrapped and I was blown away that his “silly little joke” had been so warmly received.

Then Digg got onboard.

By this morning, there were over 3000 accounts created and Useless Account had made the front page of Digg and del.icio.us. Things were out of control. Truly, the crowds had spoken. Stupid is good.

The peak is now over, but it looks like the account tally will make it to 5000. That makes my original estimate of 200 off by a long, long way. Congratulations to Jim, and his 15 minutes of fame!

So, who wants to buy a database of 5000 email addresses? JUST KIDDING! Jeez, talk about paranoid.

I’ll let the press release tell you what Quizlet does:

After entering a list of vocabulary words and definitions, users are given three ways to study them: a simple flashcard method; a highly-configurable test page including written, matching, multiple-choice, and true/false questions; and a specialized “Learn” mode that tracks the userís knowledge of individual words and retests the user only on unlearned words. The siteís most innovative features include a live chat box which classmates may use to discuss vocabulary usage (or to gossip about teachers); groups that allow users to alert classmates about new sets they have entered and to edit sets collaboratively; the ability to import data from other websites and documents quickly and easily; and the ability to quickly combine word sets to study large quantities of vocabulary at once.

Created by Andrew Sutherland and tested over the past year by some of Andrew’s friends (myself included), Quizlet is a great example of using Web2.0MG concepts to enhance a quality product, instead of just creating another tag-happy circle jerk.

Check it out, I think you might like it.

Permanent beta
All your personal data
waiting for Yahoo

It’s not true Haiku due to the lack of a seasonal reference (and probably other reasons).
Corrected

Please feel free to leave your own in the comments!