Jerry Fahrni: “All I have to say is football season is here. Finally! Finally I can listen to sports talk radio again. Finally I can watch grown men try to kill each other on the football field. Finally I get to see Ray Lewis blow up some poor schmuck. Finally I can vent my anger at something besides people. Finally Major League Baseball will slide into obscurity again until next year. Finally football season is here. Holy crap it feels like years since I watched an NFL game.”
What he said.
My next text editor, is my current text editor. It doesn’t suck.®
‘Nuff said.
All Things D, by Mike Isaac: “This was a big deal. Countless numbers of smaller start-ups rely on access to Twitter’s public-facing feed, using the tweets in their own businesses for any number of reasons. If the terms of access were to be altered significantly, it could impact the livelihoods of thousands. The company didn’t elaborate on what exactly those guidelines would be, and has said little else since. The key takeaway echoed in one repeated word: Consistency. Twitter’s future plans strove for consistency across the platform.”
I had started a post to talk about where I thought Twitter was headed, but there’s no need to finish it. Mike Isaac did a great job in his article, and can actually write. It’s better to stick with the pros.
I wonder where this is all headed, given the Delivering a consistent Twitter experience post June 29:
“Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.”
If cards are a future piece to the Twitter puzzle and they’re after a consistent user experience where does that leave third party client developers? Has Twitter made contact with them to share how they should proceed with their implementation of Twitter Cards?
I still believe there is a slight chance Twitter could pull the plug on all third party clients, but I hope not. This would give Twitter full control over all clients and allow them to kill off all their native clients and go straight for HTML in the browser.
This is, of course, a horrible idea. HTML on mobile is still disgusting, slow, and provides a horrible user experience. Why go that route?
Twitter could be a real standup citizen and provide third party clients with guidelines for the inclusion of Twitter Cards, and other options, in client applications. They could also provide an expected timeline for inclusion of these features and allow the clients to operate without the new feature until that date. When the date expires and the client doesn’t include the new feature implemented in a Twitter approved way, they’re cut off until they are compliant.
If you’re interested you can read about Twitter Cards on the Twitter Developers site.
Dave Winer: “Working with computers isn’t conducive to a whirlwind approach. You really can’t do writing, design or development work inbetween crazy-busy-life tasks. Computers don’t lend themselves to that kind of thought. You often don’t find the problem till you have a chance to quietly and dispassionately go through the situation, asking all kinds of questions along the way. It’s been observed many times that the problem often turns out to be something dumb that you overlooked. That’s exactly the kind of thing you can’t see when you’re whirling around. “
When it comes to coding I tend to stare at the screen for a long time before writing a line of code. Often I create experiments and throw them away before doing the real version. It’s not always like that, I usually do that when I’m trying something new, but work like that takes uninterrupted time.
I think Dave really nailed it.
The Verge: “He said that instead of wanting companies who “build off Twitter,” he prefers “a world where people build into Twitter” (emphasis ours).”
All this talk around building inside, and becoming a hub for events? Sounds like the MySpace mistake.
I wonder if they’re going to use Posterous as the engine to help people build inside Twitter?
Does building inside mean writing lowest common denominator HTML? Ick. With all the power we have in the palm of our hands why use it to make a less than stellar web based experience. Oh, right, it worked for Facebook.
Here’s hoping, once again, they don’t kill off third party clients.
John Marshall: “Existing WP7 apps will be recompiled to work under Metro, but nothing has been said whether this is a one time event or the developers will have the oppurtunity to continue to modify the WP7 code.”
Wow. That’s all I can say. Nokia bet the farm on Windows Phone 7, released the Lumia 900, and Microsoft does this?
Man, good thing they’re friends.
Selligy Weblog: “This is not a good trend for Apple. Apple is depending on apps like Sparrow to make the iOS platform shine. Excellent apps like Sparrow cost a lot of money to build and maintain. Apple should be working hard to ensure independent app developers can earn even more than top salaries at Google, or they will all be poached away.”
Why should, or would, Apple care about keeping developers around? If someone walked up to me with a big pile of cash and wanted to acquire my popular, or unpopular app, and I felt it was a good thing, I’d do it in a heartbeat. So would a lot of people. This is the American Free Market at its best. A company puts together a group of talented people, creates a product people love, and gets the attention of a bigger company. That bigger company comes along and gobbles up the talent. Sure, as a user of Sparrow you may be a bit bummed, but it won’t last for long. As a little guy just getting started this is an opportunity. It means if I wanted to, I could pick up where Sparrow left off and create a great email client that looks and acts just like it. Filling that hole. Heck, maybe I’ll do something MUCH better. It will happen.
I have a feeling there is a company, or individual, out there today, slinging code in hopes to bring a new Sparrow-like client to life.
That’s pretty exciting.
“I’m happy to announce today that we’ve packed up our small Vancouver studio and will be making the move to San Francisco in the coming weeks to join the design team at Facebook.” – Acrylic Blog
Wow. Who else will be acquired today?
“While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users.” – Sparrow
It sounds like Google bought a development team. Hopefully this leads to great new iOS and Android GMail clients.
Here’s hoping.
UPDATE: Oh, wow. From the Sparrow App Store page.
“As the team works on new projects, there will be no new features released for the Sparrow apps, other than minor maintenance and bug fixes.”
Do you think that will kill sales?
UPDATE 2: Matthew Panzarino, of The Next Web, has the best coverage. It includes a statement from Google that pretty much says they bought a development team to work on GMail.
