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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?"
I am just a listener and I love my podcasts for my daily commute.
The podcasts are great for me because:
- they rest my eyes (no need to read on screen)
- I don't need Internet access
- I don't need to wait for the show to be on or to be in the right country to listen to the radio show.
- they are enjoyable, entertaining and different from reading or watching TV
I tend to skip the ads, but I now who sponsors the shows I listen to so the ad/sponsoring is undoubtedly worth money.
A big thank you to all the podcasters! You made my life richer!
For listening to music, I usually prefer live streams ala Radio Paradise (love my Roku Soundbridge!), but there are a couple of places where podcasts shine:
1) NPR. I sync stuff every night for the hour commute to and from work. great way to catch up on news and such.
2) Workout music. I would never listen to dance/techno music normally, but it works well on the elliptic trainer. Here's where I get mine: http://www.djsteveboy.com/mixes.html
If we had wifi everywhere (when in the car) with access to things like Radio Paradise, podcasts wouldn't be quite as useful to me.
I can't speak to Twitter's fate, but it sure is handy for distributing Nagios notifications.
What is twitter anyway?..
I've read the comments on the end of the Scoble link ("I couldn't bear for Twitter to be silent all day" etc.) - someone please tell me that these posters are all having a laugh.
They're not serious, are they?
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?
"...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."
Or stated another way, the strengths of good writers and editors, top-shelf music, professional voice talent and an international news-gathering organization bring more value to any audio program than is possible for some guy living in Mom's basement.
Duh. Film at eleven.
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!!!
While all the comments on broadcasting bowel movements and such are amusing, I think a lot of people are missing the point of how Twitter can benefit normal (as normal as it gets 'round here, anyway), non-ADD adults who have typical non-narcissistic communication habits.
/hate/ MySpace and its ilk, but I really like Twitter and am slowly getting some of my meatspace friends who also hate the whole social networking thing to come around and start using it as well. What it's really good for, IMHO, is reconnecting me to the little bits of daily life of people I care about that get lost by distance. I have good friends across the country that I used to see every day but now only get to interact with via the occasional IM or email, and none of us are very good about keeping everyone else fully updated on what's happening with each other. Mainly it's because who has the time to write a novel every week, distribute it, hope everyone else has the time and desire to read it, and then wait to see if everyone else does the same themselves?
;) (Sorry if you get /.ed, guys!))
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I said all that to eventually link to this excellent explanation/illustration from CommonCraft.com: http://commoncraft.com/Twitter (check out their other topics too - best way I've found to explain things like RSS to my mom.
As that little video illustrates, while my Twitter feed may not be interesting to many people here, it reestablishes some of that nonessential daily communication that most of us don't even realize is there (or will be missed) until it's gone and makes me feel like I'm still somewhat involved in my long-distance friends' lives in a way that email and IM doesn't.
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!
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.