So, time to 'fess up. Flume does not exists. Which might explain why it's so bad.

About a week or so ago I caught wind of people talking about Flume. There was a "Got Flume?" website and various bloggers posted Delicious links or Twitters and Flickr Photos.

But something seemed wrong. I'm not sure what tipped me off but after a bit of discreet investigation I was almost 100% sure that it was fake and that it was a mildly elaborate joke. A sort of riff on Hype2.0 and the endless beta and invite only culture which, whilst useful to allow gradual ramping up of users to gradually test systems, also serves to artificially inflate the buzz surrounding new sites.

But the invite systems and invite only events such as Foo Camp and various other meetups and lists and forums are inherently elitist. Don't get me wrong - whilst it might seem unfair to people not in the loop, elitist and nepotistic even, a sort of modern old boys network - it's the way of the world and I actually don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it. If it makes any difference I'm not in the loop either - I've never been invited to Foo Camp for example. Apparently I'm not nearly hip enough :)

Also, to some extent, it's not a closed system. As long as you're hard working enough, loud enough and self promoting enough it's not too hard to become one of the inner circle (or one of the inner circles) if you so wish. Ok, so that's a vast over simplification but I think it's largely true.

That said it doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with them. Sacred cows make the best steaks, as the say.

So I decided that since Flume didn't exist I could write reviews of it. Bad reviews. Practically unbelievable reviews. And all the facts we're indisputable. They're as true as any other fact about Flume. I tried to put in clues that these were fake reviews - "effluvia" was a big one

Effluvium \Ef*flu"vi*um\, n.; pl. Effluvia.
[L., a flowing out, fr. effluere to flow out. See Effluent, a.]
Subtle or invisible emanation; exhalation perceived by the sense of smell; especially, noisome or noxious exhalation; as, the effluvium from diseased or putrefying bodies, or from ill drainage.
[1913 Webster]

Plus the fact that my user names were principe - a reference to Machiavelli's "Il Principe", and cirving - a reference to Clifford Irving who attempted to hoax the world by claiming he had an authorised biography of Howard Hughes.

I also though Sass as some sort of karma system would be a dead give away but I've heard word that someone else thinks that it's a great name and that they might use it. Which is scary.

What was cool was that only a few of people knew what I was doing but gwire picked up on what I was doing and joined in and a couple of other people started to put up Delicious links and Twitters linking to me and warning people off Flume. The Spool even attempted to start a disinformation campaign to counter my own disinformation campaign. This, to me, was all kinds of awesome.

Sadly the original Flume buzz never got going - apparently Hype2.0 does need some work after all which somewhat undermine my own joke. I did consider starting to astroturf for Flume but, you know, sometimes that's just taking things a little too far. I'm sad, but not that sad.

So there you go. That's the short lived story of Flume. Of course if someone now goes and starts up a new service called Flume people are going to get really confused.

Oh. My. God.

So, out of idle curiousity, I thought I'd strace the binary to see if the crashing was something dumb that I could fix easily.

It was far worse than I could have imagined.

The crash itself seems to have been caused by not checking a return value - basic rookie error. When you make an assumption out of the return value from a function you make an "ass" out of "u" and, err, "mption".

But it's what the function being called was doing that bothers me. Basically the Windows client (and I assume that the Mac one is doing something similar) goes rooting through you private data looking for stuff. Because my private data is all locked down and encrypted it caused the ferret process to crash.

Now I have to presume that the Flume guys are doing it for a reason - that it's attempting to read my Outlook and Thunderbird mail stores so that it can extract email addresses and build up clues to who I am and who my friends might be but that doesn't excuse anything.

Flume developers - NO! IF I WANTED YOU TO HAVE MY INFORMATION I'D GIVE IT TO YOU. Jesus Christ. I appreciate you trying to make stuff all one clicky and automagic and for the yokels to be blinded by the fact that you used some sort of technological sorcery to tie together their various personas and automatically add friends and collate their personas as well. But it's just bad manners for a start but what happens if my boss logs in and sees that I may be known as principe on Flume and <name>@<work>.com at $work but I could be in trouble if he also finds out that I'm spanky.mcspankerson@bdsmfistpigbukkakeslut.tv or d0kt0r_d00m@733t-h4XX0rs.org or something.

Continuing my Flume investigation ... Since the web frontend now seems to be 500-ing all the time I've resorted to only using the new version of the Windows client.

And it keeps crashing.

All. The. Time.

Weirdly enough it's not repeatable. I just get a "Inviolate access exception <random string of hex>. Report this to Microsoft yes [ ] no [ ]" style error every so often.

Annoying but I'm not particularly bothered. I've tried in vain to work out why Flume is getting so much hype. It appears to try and do a few things that other sites are doing but doesn't do them nearly as well. I'm getting a real feeling of "Selling the sizzle not the sausage".

And yet I hear on the grape vine that there's already funding on the way.

Christ on a bike.

Bubble 2.0. Silly valuations. SF people on Smart Drugs (well, Modafinil). A new Nine Inch Nails album. Anybody would think it was the 90s again.

So, I suddenly noticed that Flume had some more features. "Fair enough", I thought, "it's presumably in heavy development". But then I logged in to my other account (the first one I got) and the features had vanished. So I logged back into my second account (the one I achieved through my 733t haxx0ring and, err, changing on a field in the XML) again and the features were back.

A quick delve later and I believe now that it's to do with the 'sassiness' (their word, not mine) rating of my 'Fountain' (grind teeth at name). At first I thought that might be to do with how many friends I had or something but that appears not to be the case. It appears to be more to do with a combination of who invited you and how 'sassy' your blog (a mandatory field in the signup process) is - presumably obtained through Alexa or Digg or Technorati or something.

Since I, err, obtained my second invite by guessing the user name of a A-list blogger my second account was deemed 'sassier' (that's actually giving me a headache now) than my first and I get correspondingly more features.

How ... weird.

So by dint of blackmailing one of the cool kids I've managed to aquire a Flume invite. Flume being the super sekrit new social medoodad that the Alpha 2.0-ers have been casually referring to and then saying "oops, sorry, you're not meant to know about that".

A caveat - I've always been a bit grumpy about, well, stuff. Especially hype over substance so filter this little rant through that assumption. Even still though, and even though this is an "Epsilon" release (see what they did there! it's 2 letters after gamma! how clever!) it still seems very rough. Really rough. Like, a days hacking rough.

Still, I shall plow on.

The first thing I noticed - very generic Web 2.0. Rounded corners CHECK, gradients CHECK, neoligisms CHECK.

Oh and what Neologisms. Flume gets used as a noun and a verb. Special! Also, the Facebook style notification thingy on the landing page. Err, guys. Before deploying something like that you my want to look up "Effluvia" in the dictionary. Although to be fair it's an apt description. Never has the million monkeys hypothesis been put to the test so badly.

At least they don't use the "I'll have a vowel please Carol" naming scheme that Flickr so inadvertently started.

Oh, wait. I just noticed. In one of the emails I got the other people on the site are referred to as Flumrs. *stabby* *stabby* *face* *face*

In use - it feels slow. I thought AJAX was supposed to make the user experience better but no, it's like wading through molasses.

And of course there's no Linux client so I've had bring up a Windows Virtual Machine. Sniffing the traffic, the XML based protocol appears to have been designed by a 4 year old. Security check summing isn't in place - 0xdeadbeef all over the place in various fields is kind of a give away. On a whim I attempted to spoof someone else's account by changing a few things and ... got in. And gave myself another invite. Huzzah.

Now I don't mean to harp on like a Unix grey beard about security blah, blah, blah but this sort of stuff can't be added on later. You've got to think of it from the start. Sigh. It's like people just can't be bothered to learn the lessons others have already gone through.

And by damn is it ugly. Uglier than my sofa. Which is very ugly. Even when it's covered with a throw I bought. There may be an 80s revival in place but lurid oranges against green backgrounds (or vice versa for the account settings pages .... euggggch, I'm still shuddering) is not a good look.

Anyway, if anybody wants to 'beflume' (barf) me then I'm testing it with two accounts - try principe or cirving.