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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."
Twitter needs to focus on their core service. It frequently goes offline, like many social services did when their growth was faster than expected (Friendster, LiveJournal, etc.)
The lessons of other social networks 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 MySpace -- but will not put up with unstable service for long.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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 Tweets probably would have been archived via a distributed protocol.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"?
momentum and chutzpah.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
That was a mean feat. You managed to marry ignorance of twitter (Madonna & Hilton aren't even in the top 25 for followers) with truly offensive misogyny. I know, I know. You're too busy getting laid to care, right?
But how can people survive if they don't know what Madonna, Paris Hilton, (other useless bitch) ate for breakfast?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Sir, I'm just hoping lightning strikes you down because you seem to be unable to form a coherent sentence.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.