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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?"
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!
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.
It's also what we like to call "wrong".
I can't speak to Twitter's fate, but it sure is handy for distributing Nagios notifications.
'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.
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.
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'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?
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!!!
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!
Unrelated?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Dude, chill out. The word has entered the OED, as well as all respectable dictionaries. Indeed, I find Webster's definition quite apt:
a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed, accessed by subscription over the Internet
As you can see, there's no mention of 'iPod' in the definition of the word; nor has there ever been. Now, the etymology of a word is very different to its definition, and I'll grant you that etymologically speaking, podcast wasn't the most correct word to describe this technology, but if you look at the etymology of most of the words we are now using in the English language, you'll see that we are using many of our words in a very convoluted manner. Quite often, the definition we now associate to our words vastly differs with what etymologically the word should mean.
Reading today's news articles, I'm sure when we read: Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis, we don't think that they are systematically killing one out of ten wildlife species in Zimbabwe, even though that's what etymologically, decimate should mean. Now, why should it be any different for podcast?
Languages are living creatures, they evolve and change. At the end of the day, language is a means of communication, and if by saying podcast, both me and you are referring to the same thing and communicating effetively, not only is podcasting not wrong, it is quite an apt and unambiguous word.
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While I can't control how other people use Twitter, I personally do not have it sending me emails, IM's, texts, or anything else. The only way I can see what people are saying on Twitter is by actually going to the website. This is why I don't see why I'm "spamming people via Twitter" when I write a message on it. To me it's no different than reading Slashdot.
Having Twitter "invade your life" is 100% an opt-in experience. I never opted-in, so I don't feel like it's invading my life.
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.
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