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."

Comments

Re:Twitter?

[istartedi]

I actually use it quite a bit. I follow a few, carefully chosen people. Of all the "Web 2.0" stuff, Twitter is the one that stuck. I like the simplicity of it. A short character limit is twisted genius. I don't tweet every day. I'm not following anybody who posts their location all the time or tweets about their grocery shopping.

That said, I understand it's not everybody's cup of tea. I feel the same way about FaceBook that some people feel about Twitter. I tried FB for a while, and it just seems to have a way of making everybody look like a drunken idiot.

It seems like it's possible to find quite a few people on Twitter who tweet appropriately, and tweet interesting things. It hasn't been infected with *ville applications yet.

Re:Twitter?

[Infonaut]

I consider twitter to be a helpful engine for serendipitous discovery. Sometimes I want to search for information, sometimes I want information to come to me from interesting people. The first time I tried twitter I didn't get it, but I had the nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. So when I came back to it a few months later, I thought of it as an information stream I could dip into when I felt like discovering something new.

Getting focused?

[BitZtream]

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.