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Why Twitter Should Stay Out of the App Business
waderoush writes "Twitter has come out with some impressive new tools this month — the Twitter app for iPhone/iPad on September 1, and the overhauled Twitter website, or #NewTwitter, this week. But Twitter is late to its own party, Xconomy argues today. #NewTwitter still lacks basics like photo uploading and URL shortening, and apps built by third-party developers like TweetDeck and Flipboard continue to provide more compelling ways to explore the information in a Twitter stream. While Twitter may finally be 'getting focused' on ways to achieve mass market growth, as former Twitter platform manager Alex Payne wrote this week, the company will have a hard time competing with its own developer community — and might do better instead to acknowledge, and focus on, the service's growing role as a general Internet utility."
The article says it, but not in the way I want: by extending their own platform, they do hurt their third party developers. Presumably the idea they do it though is to be able to track that stuff for themselves, and presumably to try and "do it better" with better integration.
I don't really use twitter, so I can't comment, but I ask of you who do: is this the case? Is what twitter is starting to offer "in house" better than what's available from 3rd party, or can they even improve on it enough and faster?
General Internet utility makes general internet utility revenues. They will find a way to squeeze out the developers' efforts and take in the big bucks from the service oriented applications.
There are a number of great twitter clients out there for pretty much every platform that connects to the Internet. At this point, Twitter as a company would be better served spending their money in beefing up their infrastructure, staving off spambots, and various other back-end stuff. What's the point in them spending money and time to create an "official" client? How would that actually earn them any money, compared to improving the quality of their service?
Living With a Nerd
Post subject represents what I would like to read.
Oh eternal September!
I'm not just picking on Twitter here, honestly. In fact, *most* of what's on the Internet shouldn't be a business. Before the Internet was commercial, DNS was developed via the RFC process. If the Internet had been commercialized before DNS, how many commercial "IP namer" services would we have? Likewise, if SMS had been common before the Internet was commercialized, something like Twitter would likely have been developed via the RFC process. Tweets probably would have been archived via a distributed protocol. Remember USENET? There was a distributed posting and archiving system for messages of considerably longer length. It was all specified via the RFC process. What is Twitter, but USENET with a protocol that enforces a maximum message length, IDs users, and has a non-distributed posting and archiving mechanism?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Usenet is a protocol, but it has businesses behind it. Twitter is both at this point.
Are you saying they should let their protocol be open and just be a single provider of that protocol? Seems to me they'd definitely hurt in the short run. And that would force them to go even further into the app-making business to stay afloat.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Comment removed based on user account deletion
if Twitter has it's own apps and gives them away for free then that's fine,
the user is getting a quality standard that 3rd parties have to beat for other people to give them money.
No I'm not saying what Twitter should do. Twitter will do whatever it can to survive. That's its job.
I'm saying I could replace my Twitter with alt.tweet.i.s.t.a.r.t.e.d.i where the USENET protocol is enhanced to only permit 140 characters and to limit posts under the alt.tweet hierarchy.
If USENET can't handle that in its current form then of course the protocol would need some tweaks.
Also, USENET, AFAIK, came to be regarded as an administrative hassle by a lot of ISPs. Everything moved under HTTP, and got reinvented. From my PoV, Twitter is just restricted, centralized USENET under the HTTP protocol.
The business model for USENET died at a lot of ISPs. Either you pay admins for USENET servers, or you suffer ads on Twitter. TANSTAAFL.
I guess what I'm really saying is that I've been on the Internet too long (since 1992) and it has become my lawn, which most of you should get off of. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Do people actually use Twitter? I just don't get it... seems like one of the most useless things ever
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
I finally read TFA (yeah, I know this is /., what was I thinking?)
The VCs have funded Twitter to the tune of $160 million. Ouch.
All is not lost. If Twitter is just USENET, and USENET died because the RFC process was slow to innovate and USENET servers were a PiTA to run, then the business model becomes apparent.
Twitter should sell enhanced services to ISPs. They could reinvent USENET totally, and not just a short message hierarchy. For starters, make the current services distributed. Then, colocate with the ISPs for a fee. ISPs advertise "we haven't had a fail whale in a month" and/or "your tweets snap up without delay", to their customers.
If you could go back in time and offer "outsourced USENET with innovative features", it might not have sold. Enhanced, QoS'd, ISP branded Twitter might sell though.
Reworking the Twitter business model wouldn't be easy, but that seems like a direction that would allow Twitter to survive as a business, and provide better service for users.
If it turns into an advertising cesspool, I don't see how it can survive. There are enough things like that already, and people will just flock someplace else.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Vlad farted
Ubuntu needs to focus on its core experience. It frequently sinks into terrible desktop user experience, like many Linux distros did when their growth was faster than expected.
The lessons of other distros should be a clue that focusing on infrastructure stability needs to be a priority. People will get used to a crappy interface -- just look at Gentoo -- but will not put up with unstable service for long. ... Fixed that for you!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In other words, "enough with the fail whale!". Indeed.
Also, if you elect to have certain people's tweets sent through SMS to your phone, sometimes that doesn't work.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Seriously ... using the word focused in relation to a website/service that doesn't allow messages long enough to really even complete a thought in writing?
Twitter is entirely about serving people with absolutely no focus what so ever. Seems like 'focusing' would be exactly what they don't want to do.
Of course, I think twitter is about the dumbest service I've ever seen. It was a retard solution to the fact that phones had a no useful email client really because for some odd reason, no one has realized that a proper imap setup is all thats needed to get 'push' messaging. Twitter made sense before everyone that texted had phones that were more than capable of using a real alternative that actually allows to you complete at least one thought in a single message.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You're right. The top followed people on twitter are celebrities.
I was being glib about the top 25 thing, but it doesn't really who the top 25 are anyway. Does the fact that the NY Times Bestseller list is packed with trash mean that all book readers like John Grisham? Just as I could read books until the end of time without ever reading a bestseller, I could use twitter for as long as I lived without ever following a celebrity. I actually find twitter most useful for niche interests.
Saying that a medium open to anyone and everyone is "for dumb people mindlessly following pop trash" sounds deliberately provocative. I don't own a TV, but I don't think that everyone who uses one is an idiot. I doubt you actually believe that everyone who uses twitter is stupid, either. Your dislike of the medium seems to have blinded you to the notion that there are many ways to use it, just as there are many ways to use other media.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ