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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 Tweets probably would have been archived via a distributed protocol.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"?
I consider it an improvement. Instead of not reading a 10 paragraph blog, I can now not read a 140-character snark.
But seriously, I think twitter has ruined the web. Not twitter itself, but other people's integration with twitter. Used to be, you had a blog or news story or something, people would comment on it. 99.99% of the time, I won't ever see the blog and won't give a a shit. But let's say I do and I do. Instead of some potentially interesting comments, I see "@zyx retweeted this". Or "xyz liked this". Or "zyz pingback".
And even in forums that support threading, you'll see this gay @shit, #suckmydick, etc. It's worse than posting bbcode on slashdot.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
> will not put up with unstable service for long.
Here's where you are very wrong. Twitters service failures are legendary and persist to this day. And they are still around, bigger than ever.
Just to give you a sense of how long people have put up with them: I "quit" Twitter in July of 2008 because of aggravation with their service failures which was already a running joke *THEN*. I thought for sure no way people would put up with that amount of downtime and unreliability.
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ