Slashdot Mirror
Will Twitter Join Podcasting on the 'Net Sidelines'?
Ian Lamont writes "Twitter has established itself in some quarters as a must-have communications tool, and its power to connect and even incite people is hard to deny. But does Twitter have long-term, mainstream potential? Or does a poor revenue model and strong competition mean that it's destined to be a sideline Internet technology, much like podcasting has failed to live up to early hype?"
Along with Erris, Mactrop and all his other sockpuppets.
Ah, social networking AND SMS. Could the fusion of two incredibly annoying technologies be any better?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
but I love hearing about everything that happens to my friends.
I love the Twitter technology, personally, but I don't see it going mainstream any time soon, if ever. At least, not in its current setup. Now, what I could see is a Yahoo or some such buying them out, and trying to integrate it a la MyBlogLog, Flickr, etc.
Twitter needs to make a few changes, and its adoption curve could turn upwards -
the biggest in my mind?
Allow linked URLs.
That would double its usefulness.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Podcasting has hardly been sidelined. In the radio business, podcasting is utterly huge--a transformative, disruptive technology that is propelling new business models and new integration of old and new medias. I host a public radio show myself: our podcasting audience is the equivalent of having a dozen more stations syndicate our show. I'm a convert, too: in 2004 I said podasting was DOA. Boy, was I wrong. I'm now at the point where podcasts are the main way I get radio an it's true for more and more people. We know because our radio audience tells us so and we see it in the numbers.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
I don't see any sidelining of podcasting. I can get podcasts everywhere.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
All of these social networking sites are popular because they let people play the high school socialization game at any stage in life, and they make it very public. Now you don't just become popular - everyone can see how popular you are. It's a minigame for life, or at least for the lives of rather dull people.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I don't know what the fate of Twitter will be. It seems like it's not doing anything complicated, so even if the concept lives on, it might be that Twitter itself goes under.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what's being said here about podcasting. I think the hype has certainly died down, but the hype on the internet in general has died down too. Gone are the days where people thought putting up a website automatically meant earning millions of dollars.
I know some very non-technical people who download free podcasts of popular radio and TV shows to play on their iPods instead of listening to the radio. They aren't bragging about it or even talking much about it unless you bring it up, but that's only because it's become common-place enough that it's not interesting anymore. Sure, there are lots of people who don't listen to podcasts, but there are also lots who do.
Not that I have anything investing in the argument. I don't really care whether podcasting is a "sideline" technology. I'm just not sure what it means to call podcasting a "sideline" technology. It's not a rarely-used technology, though.
Lately, I seem to see "podcasting" used as simply a name for MPEG 4 video files. That's useful, because it promotes a standardized format, instead of yet another proprietary Microsoft codec with DRM features that phone home.
I can't speak to Twitter's fate, but it sure is handy for distributing Nagios notifications.
I like twitter because it's fast. You only get so many characters for a post (likely due to SMS limitations) so you just type in something small and go. I don't use it over SMS just through the web, though i'm working on an AIM bridge. Their API is nice and the dev community is really friendly and helpful. The only downside is it's kind of hard to build up a set people to follow/followers
I've actually considered applying for a job there but i dunno... I live in Dallas.
my twitter name is chasd00 (along with almost everything else)
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
This is "The Industry Standard" we're talking about. They don't care who's doing what for free. If it's not making significant people significant amounts of money, it may as well not exist. Can you show that podcast has propelled any of these new business models into actual profitability? If not, you won't get folks like "The Industry Standard" to listen to you saying how transformative and disruptive it is, because without the cash flow, it simply isn't to them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's a fucking Traveling Wilburys song, which The Headstones covered (poorly). Seriously, you need to listen to some Wilburys: Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison.
So I guess it's ironic that I use Twitter to keep in contact with my fellow podcasters as a whole. Two failed technologies, married into one!
Honestly, I like to use it because it's like I can say something to all of these other podcasters in other communities without spamming their email box. Yes, if what I have to say takes more than, say, 280 characters (two tweets) then I will either use email or just call them. But for short bursts, I love it.
I think that the concept of Twitter is simple enough that it will never go away, but the hype may die down soon enough. Much like how podcasting hasn't gone away, it's hype just died down.
Twitter is to instant messaging what blogging is to email.
-via
MHNATY.
WTF? Really? That's the big question? Who cares? I also wonder if people are going to turn back into apes. Or maybe we will be forced to return to the sea and become the next whales. I wonder if Microsoft will still be annoying and wasting time in my child's life. Maybe Twitter will be the only thing left because of its simplicity and real world functionality. But again, who the f* cares? Either you use it or you don't. Slow news day /.?
Check out http://twitter.com/DieLaughing and tell me if it's worth it.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
Anything that sucks too much time for too little value will fail.
'Twitter has established itself in some quarters as a must-have communications too' APRIL FOOLS!!! right? Well sadly this line was not meant to be all that funny. Twitter is a giant pile of shit. Yes that is right you heard me. For the most part it allows attention hungry people that can't get what they need out of regular blog entries that can be easily ignored, they some how get gratification knowing that all sorts of people are now getting updates at all hours of the day that they are doing mundane SHIT. Great I am glad to know that you are are washing your toy poodle fluffy. Its also really nice to know you are alone drinking at a bar AGAIN. Yeah its nice to know that I can trim away unwanted messages at hours of the day I would like to be sleeping, but until I can find some way of defining what I want to receive updates on based on tags related to content such as social interaction request, personal chore completion, or attention grab by anorexic cutter previously ignored on livejournal I really don't think I am going to renew my deleted account.
arrest, try, convict, and sentence the world's largest crime syndicate
Sincerely,
Joseph Smith
I listen to about 15 podcasting shows a week. What hype was there? Its not now or ever going to be a moneymaker or something controlled by big media. Its doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
is for twits.
I think the issue is that while "Mainstream Media" (in particularly NPR/PRI) has embraced it whole-heartedly with the iPod-using masses on the bandwagon as listeners...nobody's watching/listening to the crap put out by the "technorati" and average joes. It's embarrassing to be "pioneers" and get completely steamrollered by traditional media, and ignored by the general public. Or, they think that because it's failing for them, it's "dead" for everyone else; there's this insipid belief amongst the technology-using loud-mouths that the world revolves around them. If everyone's blogging about how great jam-and-sausage sandwiches are (or more amusingly, blogging about how everyone is blogging about it), it MUST be true, right?
I can't stand video/pod casts (or worse, "video blogs") by Joe Shmoes, or even the "big" "bloggers". Usually they take about 5 minutes to express an opinion or convey a bit of news that could have been written in one short paragraph I could have read in about 20 seconds.
The whole thing reminds me about the comparison between Walmart and online companies; a single Walmart pulls in more profits in one DAY than most silicon valley companies do in a YEAR. That's how completely insignificant most "Web 2.0" crap truly is.
Please help metamoderate.
They don't see that podcasting has inundated the Internet and is everywhere? As for Twitter; MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube (well maybe not YouTube) were not making money at the stage Twitter is in. Are we to understand from the idiots at The Standard, who are just trying to drive traffic to their irrelevant site (they are so desperate to make it relevant again that it is embarrassing), that Twitter should be held to a higher 'Standard'..no pun intended..heh..then the most recent successes in the Internet space.
Kiss off Standard...everyone read Slashdot and Techmeme and you will be fine.
- Doug K.
Twitter is important. This was going to be a blog post, but whatever. I don't know if Twitter itself will be successful, but something like it is key. It changes the AIM/Facebook/Skype, etc. model of "posting your status" around by letting the recipient determine how they receive the data you post (do they have to check for it? Is it in their "feed"? Do they get notified by SMS?). As a poster, you don't know how the information you provide will be consumed by others. This makes it fundamentally different than the out-of-the-box (meaning "default") experience on traditional "post your status" services. Usually, when you email someone, they have to check the email and then they get your message. If you want a "push" message, you have to change services (SMS, call). Same with status - traditional status messages are "pull" only for the consumer - they have to check to see what your status is - they can't be notified.
But Twitter has something else: its simple. It really only does one thing. A lot of people who use Facebook don't understand what Twitter offers: "I can post status on Facebook and do a ton of other stuff, too. Why use Twitter?" Good question, which leads me to my point.
I think if we adopt a Unix philosophy with these services by keeping them simple and providing an open API (command-line switches and stdin/stdout, if you will), we can engage in service composition; the combination of many simple services into complex structures using standard interfaces.
Where can this be used? Well, in my case, I use Twitter, read news on Google Reader, vote and post on Slashdot, Reddit and Digg, maintain a blog and have a Facebook account. A service like FriendFeed pulls all these together, and is then an "object" that I can work with. So, instead of heading over to Facebook to update my status, I can post to Twitter from Emacs (twit.el, I'm not joking), have FriendFeed harvest that info and populate my Facebook page using their app for Facebook. Again, composition of simple services to make complex things happen. If I share a story on Reader, FriendFeed picks that up as well and will update my homepage and my FaceBook page with the info. This is a great example of reuse - who wants to update 15 services to let their friends know they'll be out of town or to tell them about some news story they saw that was cool?
I use it as a unifying force between my blogs, Twittersig to keep it up in my forum signatures, an additional RSS feed for services like Squidoo... Unlike websites like OnXIAm and FriendFeed that force folk to use an entirely new site just to keep up, Twitter goes the other route and merges itself into everyone else's pages.
How can you argue with that?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Roy Orbison seems so out of place in that group. And at the same time, so awesome. Not so noticable in Tweeter and the Monkeyman, but in other songs.
I'm a bit confused. Maybe I missed the hype that Podcasting has failed to live up to, but I use it every day and I think it's fantastic. Finally, the days of streaming-only RealAudio are gone!
iTunes is used by bajillions of people worldwide, and the Podcast button is right there, prominently displayed. There's all kinds of content, from public radio shows that I can now enjoy whenever is convenient for me instead of whenever they're broadcast on the air, commercial stuff like NBC Nightly News, tons of independent stuff running the gamut from utter crap to sheer genius, great comedy like The Onion Radio News and the Weekly Radio Address, and probably more I haven't bothered to look for yet.
Of course I understand that many people aren't interested in any of this, and that's fine, but Podcasting is certainly not a failure.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've always dreaded that, upon growing older, I would become one of those old folks who just don't "get it". You know, like your granddad who doesn't know what all this hype is about the Internet, or your elderly Aunt whose VCR always flashes "12:00". Thus, I've made an effort to keep abreast of current technologies and trends.
Now I look at Twitter, and I have to wonder, has the "not getting it" finally started to overwhelm me? Is it possible that Twitter isn't something other than just broadcast instant messaging for the ADD crowd? Could it actually be something more than taking social networking to a pathetic extreme, where informing your friends of your breakfast choices and bowel movements via SMS somehow seems like a good idea? Am I going to be relegated to shaking my fists and yelling at kids to "Get off of my lawn^H^H^H^H Internets!" like some sort of crotchety old miser?
..at least in terms of brainwashing and branding.
Somehow, Apple got people to think it is somehow related to one of their products, the iPod, and worked the word "pod" into a brief, catchy term that merely means "a hyperlink to an audio file." I haven't kept up with the latest iPod models (can they play Vorbis yet?) but all the ones I've seen, don't have networking capability, so the machines aren't (weren't?) even able to downloading a podcast -- and yet a hyperlink to an audio file is named after their product.
That's pretty fucking spectacular.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
While I don't think Podcasting is sidelined, as many here have said, I think it is at an extreme disadvantage to produce due to (an admittedly almost negligible) amount of investment required to, I dunno, not sound like crap. Listening? I've had an iPod for years now, and even those I know without an iPod have other MP3 players, or listen on their PCs, or whatever...
As for twitter. I use it (@danlowlite, and don't make fun of my shirt, I was young and foolish...).
Will it be sidelined? I dunno. It's an investment, and you have to be able to balance it all. I think I am following too many people. I really can't keep track of them. I will have to see who remains most interesting.
I like it because of the track feature. Which allows you to subscribe to certain words and whenever someone twitters those words (following them or not), you get a notification (I use IM). Sometimes it's just coincidence. Sometimes it's a URL or something relevant. It's always something I probably wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
Other people have mentioned the "Mass e-mail" effect. That's useful, except none of my face to face friends are on twitter. Or Pownce (@danlowlite) (a competitor which I also use via one twitter client, twhirl).
Personal mood tracking, too?
Dan
Someone should confirm this but I think there is a plugin for some blogs that will put a snippet of your blog posting onto Twitter with a link. This makes it basically like a glorified RSS feed but also with the added advantage of being easier to use and having broader support.
Oh, you mean that thing where they distribute an MP3 file? Where's the success or failure of that? I think it's funny that Apple fanbois are running with it like Apple actually did something that no one else ever had. It's a fucking audio file with an Applized name. Get over it!
If twitter is as big a 'failure' as podcasting then they'll be quite happy I'm sure. Starts with a false premise, adds in zero facts other than the names of the founders, and the only real 'reason' they call it a future failure is because IM clients can do much of the same thing. Newsflash: you can integrate twitter with your IM. And anyone who only uses one IM protocol is living in the dark ages.
Oh, it's from Industry Standard. My criticism was redundant then.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
One of these trends is not like the others. One of these trends is not the same. One of these trends is not like the others. Which trend goes down?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
First, a clarification to the above: Twitter also works just fine with delivery over IM, so any Jabber client like Google Talk (which has a nice client on e.g. Blackberries and works on iPhones et al) will do instead, so no need to use SMS if you don't want to. Plus one can go to one's Twitter page and see a running narrative of everyone being 'followed', so it can be used in a mode with no 'instant' delivery at all.
Which leads to the main point: It's wrong to get hung up on the 'immediacy' of Twitter, because there are other technologies that already do that well (IM, email...), and this is perhaps why I think a lot of people don't get it or dismiss it as pointless. The niche that Twitter fills is asynchronous communication between 2 or more people. It's publish-subscribe.
The problem with all the other forms of instant communication we have (phone calls, SMS message, IM, email...) is that they are all interrupts: people stop whatever they are doing when you initiate communcation this way. But often one just wants to update one's own status, or make an observation about something without causing an interrupt, but still allowing the set of potentially interested people to see your updates when they are available, ready and interested.
Example: Person A is going out to drinks after work with friends. B might join if time permits, but is on a coding deadline and will potentially work rather late. A twitters progress (leaving bar X, moving to Y where there is also food), which does not interrupt B. B reaches a good stopping point, checks A's twitters, is able to meet friends at Y later in evening.
That, and variations thereof, is what Twitter is good at.
I think you need to leave the Internet alone a little bit.
Flamebait? Someone from The Industry Standard had mod points to spend.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I think the issue is that while "Mainstream Media" (in particularly NPR/PRI) has embraced it whole-heartedly
Bleh! That should have said, "I think the issue is that while "Mainstream Media" (okay, mostly NPR/PRI)" etc etc.
Please help metamoderate.
I'd like to ad that Revision3 has the best ads, stuff that you would never see on broadcast/cable. Martin Sargent (host of Internet Superstar on Rev3) does some downright creepy/disturbing ads for Netflix.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Designed to suck you in and post comments. Mission accomplished.
I hate it too. "Podcasting" has nothing to do with an iPod, yet it's an established word, and it's difficult to come up with another word for an RSS feed of audio files.
However, most of the time I've seen people post regular video files, it's explicitly not a podcast -- it's something like a "video blog", a "YouTube blog", etc. Or, occasionally, it's "screencasting", and those can be relatively useful.
It's perverse, though -- a lot of these ideas are not new, yet suddenly, when you take two or three 5+ year old technologies, use them together in some relatively logical way, and give it a trendy name, it becomes hugely popular. The same is true of Twitter, and even (especially?) of Myspace.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
We already have simple, open APIs for a few things -- REST is one of the better ways of doing that.
And yes, I know emacs can do anything.
Here's the problem with Twitter, if I understand it -- it's a centralized service. Like Myspace, or Facebook, it's a walled garden -- you have to register with them, and your ability to "tweet" or do whatever it is they provide lives and dies with them.
Compare this to a much older technology -- email. Any one mailserver can go down without the "email network" going down -- it is completely decentralized. Anyone can setup their own mailserver -- the barrier of entry is very low -- which means that it's very difficult for any one company to become so entrenched that they get to set the rules. Jabber is a more instant variant of the same philosophy.
So... Twitter is for posting your status to the world, right? Why not do that via something like OpenID? You can still have your "only does one thing" philosophy -- a status is a status, and nothing more.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Twitter is easier to use and has broader support than RSS? Is this the same RSS that has support built into the majority of the current generation of web browsers?
...Since that's another case of the exact same thing. Every flash-based video on the Web is called a "YouTube clip," often when they're not even hosted by YouTube. Just as if someone asked if I Googled something and I said, "No, I used Yahoo," they'd think I was a jackass. "Google" = internet search, "YouTube" = flash video, "Podcast" = downloadable audio file.
For non-tech examples, see Dumpster, Kool-Aid, Post-It and Sharpie. When an innovative product gets branded successfully enough by one company, it can become a generic term.
The only podcast I need is CowboyNeal.
thesync.org seems to have gone away, so if you have a masochistic bent and want to hear Hemos, CowboyNeal, CmdrTaco, et al talking about 6-year-old news, go here.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
When i first started w/ twitter i would try to keep up all day long, but then i remembered that i have a job and stuff... so, now i read it for a bit in the AM and then again in the PM and respond to things I find interesting. I contribute content too so my followers can get a feel for who i am, what i'm interested in, etc...
Feel free to follow me on twitter - my name is tjtrapp.
BTW - its not just implemented via SMS, you can use any number of 3rd party apps to get and send content as well as have it sent to ure mobile via google talk.
Cheers.
If people are really interested in you, you shouldn't have to shove content down their throats.
--- I do not moderate.
Yeah, I like that the ads are integrated into the show as part of the entertainment content, and aren't an annoying interruption. All of Leo Laporte's podcasts are sponsored by Audible audio books, and it basically serves as an excuse for his co-hosts to discuss what they're reading.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Since when did podcasting get sidelined? iTunes U is a huge college program now that may yet change education.
People have been able to send 140 character messages, append them to a pages, or whatever it is twitterers do from their phones, for eons; but someone managed to package it into an attractive, easy-to-use package called, "twitter" and now it's popular. Unfortunately they nobody's quite figured out how to exploit it yet so, barring some spectacular innovation, I believe it should be gone in a few months.
THIS IS A CRY FOR HELP!
I can choose to ignore your threads. I did so for quite a while. Then I start seeing these posts turn up in a name suspiciously like mine... with exactly the same style of writing and anti-Microsoft paranoia, and it was such an incredibly obvious piece of idiocy that I'm surprised you thought you would get away with it. Then I realise you have 3 more accounts, at least, and now ignoring you isn't good enough because you're such an inherently dishonest person that you started coming up with ways of bypassing the tools honest Slashdotters can use to filter you out.
So, saying 'you can ignore me' is now completely irrelevant, and you're the one that made it that way. The only way to carry on decent discussion at this site is to keep forcing you to be honest by being proactive and flagging up the comments where you shill yourself so that people can actually come in to a discussion with you with all the information.
Seriously though, did you bypass common sense lessons somewhere along the way? Maybe you haven't noticed, but you're absolutely free to point out the good things free software does, and to share your opinion on why non-free software is evil, and when you did that you had mod points, excellent karma and some respect from people. However, you are absolutely not free to misrepresent yourself - and since you started shilling yourself with your Erris account right through to this debacle right now, all you have managed to do is discredit yourself. You've run two accounts into negative karma, you have 3 more that will most likely go the same way, and it's all your fault.
So why don't you grow a pair, get some respect for people on this website and fucking stop. Treat everyone else like human beings instead of sheep that you think you're supposed to lead by hook or by crook to the promised land of GNU/Linux and let them make their own minds up. Have you learnt yet? How are you going to advocate free software when nobody believes a word you say?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
it basically serves as an excuse for his co-hosts to discuss what they're reading.
And eventually we'll have gone full circle to the days of radio plays, when The Shadow would stop by his house for a cup of Lipton Tea after chasing down whatever gangster he was after for the evening.
Such as WOW, Slashdot and black holes ?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
C'mon, you are talking about digital recording. It's not new, it's not especially cool, and it's not innovative to stick "pod" on words. You can't steal Steve Jobs' mojo by copying his marketing schtick, he'll have something new next year and all his slavering fan boys will just leave you alone and palely loitering.
Sure, you get a larger audience when you offer more formats - are you honestly surprised? How is this new? People have been offering a choice of formats since before the web was born, back in the ftp & gopher days. The more formats you support the more people can use your output. "Look, Martha, I can choose text or audio! How convenient!" After all - if you want to be heard by more ears, speak more languages.
Multiple format provisions are great. But "podcasting" is just another buzzword, wake me when something new happens.
[This post also available in Ogg Vorbis, WMV, and Quicktime audio]
You truly are damaged, twitter.
Thanks for proving my point, Twitter.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Once upon a time, I had twitter flagged as Friend here on Slashdot.
Seriously.
I'd read several of his posts that sounded well thought out and altogether reasonable.
Then, when his comments became a tad more noticeable (Friends get +1, Foes get +6; thus I never give Foes positive karma), I realized he was a twit. Now I foed all his known accounts and will continue to do so.
What I simply do not get is the religious fanatic-like persistence in calling Microsoft M$ (which, I'd wager, is one of the ways of discovering his sockpuppets; henceforth I shall call this kind of juvenile misspelling twittering) and equally fanatic-like paranoid delusions.
I have great experience with religious paranoid freaks (self-proclaimed prophets and their ilk), and twitter scores highly on all points.
Now, I really dislike Microsoft's software in general as well as their business practices. But twitter's behaviour would sooner drive me towards Microsoft than away from it.
Some people claim twitter is actually a Microsoft shill, playing a rabid fanatic in order to discredit F/OSS.
Sadly, he is not. He is merely a fanatic and a twit: I have never known anyone to play such a role for so long, paid or not.
Ignore this signature. By order.
It should be a feature of a more robust site like FaceBook.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
It's too early to tell about Twitter.
CONCERT BLAST!
Podcasting on Concert Reviews, Interviews, and Music Discussions
http://www.concertblast.com/
concertblast @ gmail.com
You don't need lot's of infrastructure to make a funny podcast, you just need some funny people.
:'(
Like Audiocrush was great, but it's gone now.
My response to Lamont's claims, in a post entitled How can Twitter Beat the Odds? Found here - http://www.joshshill.com/2008/04/07/how-can-twitter-beat-the-odds/
http://joshshill.com - where geek-culture, comics and science come crashing together
What's this talk about podcasts being sidelined? I just found a sweet new way to get podcasts on my phone, and now I'm listening to more than ever. You should check out lexy.com.