All Things D: “As Sippey’s post notes, it seems that copycat clients — or third party apps that really don’t add much value outside of what Twitter.com offers — may be on the chopping block”
Another take on yesterday’s Twitter announcement.
Can you imagine being stuck with Twitter’s mobile client, or worse, TweetDeck?
If this does happen, and I don’t believe it will, I feel super sorry for the likes of Iconfactory and Tapbots.
The Next Web: “And if you’re someone who uses Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Osfoora, or any of the other ‘standard’ Twitter clients I’d be worried too. Because if there’s one thing they were designed to do and do well it is “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.â€
I love Twitterrific. I use it on my iPhone and on my Mac. It’s my app of choice for viewing the Twitter fire hose. It would be a real shame if Twitter started shutting third-party clients out.
I’m hopeful they won’t.
Sachin Agarwal : “Hi- I’ve been emailing the support link for help RE the 100MB limit for a few weeks and haven’t gotten any replies. Does anyone do support anymore? Trying to figure out if there is a way to increase my total allowed uploads for the preschool blog I started to share photos/narrative with families of children I teach. Love the interface/look/functionality but not feeling the 100mb limit! help! thanks,”
This is a comment from the announcement of the Twitter acquisition of Posterous. I couldn’t find a permanent link to the post, so you’ll have to scroll to find it.
I like Posterous, it took a while, but I warmed up to it. It’s trying to compete with the hipster juggernaut, Tumblr. That is quite the uphill battle.
I really do hope Twitter does something interesting with the Posterous platform. It would be nice to see some sort of tie in between the two. This comment leads me to believe it’s going to go the way of the dodo bird.
I still think it was a talent acquisition, but I hope for more.
Posterous Blog: “Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.”
Twitter Blog: “Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.”
What to make of this? Twitter bought development talent, not a web logging platform. My guess is they’ll mothball Posterous. Look at the language in the two posts above. Words like “We’ll give you notice” and “For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service” don’t give me much faith in the continued operation of Posterous as a platform.
I could be wrong? Maybe Twitter will move their weblogs to Posterous and continue building the service as a competitor to Tumblr, maybe the service will be shuttered?
MG Siegler: “The most powerful aspect of Twitter, to me, is its mobile/client usage. The website is fine, but not its core, in my opinion. Some love it, some hate it. It will never be Facebook — it doesn’t have to be. Twitter’s mobile experience (no matter which app you use) is much better than Facebook’s because the simple nature of the network is a more natural fit for mobile.”
You’d think Zuck would understand how important mobile is. If he thinks Facebook Mobile is good, he’s smoking crack. Facebook’s mobile apps is absolutely hideous and buggy. This is where Twitter shines. There are multiple clients that outstrip the client offered by Twitter. Apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot are fantastic. I easily do 90% of my tweeting from a mobile client.
Dave Winer: “It’s not news, and certainly not surprising. And it’s not surprising either that Twitter is upset, but what is surprising is the sheer chutzpah of Twitter complaining about Google shutting them out after Twitter unilaterally reversed course and put most of their developer community out of business when they announced they wanted to completely own the Twitter client business.”
It seems like we’re headed for a bunch of walled gardens. Facebook is already a walled garden and moves like this seem to indicate these guys are desperate for eyeballs. Captive eyeballs. Let’s just keep making the Internet more and more proprietary! Yay!
Oh, don’t worry, SOPA will be the real nail in the coffin of the Internet.
Reuters [Anthony De Rosa]: “The difference between the two is that microblogs tend to rely heavily on short bursts of information: links, photos, videos and brief messages. Blogger fatigue gave way to sharing smaller, less labor intensive bits of content.”
In the wayback, before the time of Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous, we had what were referred to as weblogs, or blogs for short (a word I absolutely hate.)
When I started my weblog in 2001 I’d post small, less labor intensive bits of content, like pictures, links, and brief messages. My weblog looked more like my Twitter stream looks today. Go look at the archives, you’ll find many examples.
Anywho, I find all the talk about weblogging being dead, tiring. It’s alive and well in late 2011, and I’m sure it’ll continue to thrive in 2012. It’s just doing what everything else does, it’s evolved.
I’ve wanted a way to get my entire stream of updates out of Twitter for a very long time. I’ve been using Backupify, which is ok. A friend just pointed me to The Exporter, which will email you an XML backup of your stream. It’s really nice, but not quite what I’m after.
Dave Winer has been working on his Scripting 2 system, which I think may have this capability, but I’m not sure.
I’m of two minds on the subject.
I’d love to find a service that would allow me to specify an FTP, a backup strategy, an archive layout, and have it push HTML or XML to the my site. This way I could have something like fahrni.ws/twitter/archive/YYYY/MM/DD as the home of my Twitter stream. I’d have an index at the root of fahrni.ws/twitter that would have a week, or two, of tweets and a link at the bottom of the page that would allow me to navigate backward and forward through a week at a time. Sounds simple, but I’m sure it would take a bit of time to create it.
I say difficult because I think it would be awesome to define an open REST interface that could be used as a backup mechanism for anything. Once the interface is defined the tough work would begin. It would need to have implementations that are then hooked up to services that can communicate with them.
For instance, let’s say you implement this new REST interface on your server, who in the world is going to make calls to it? Someone else? Maybe. It could be you implement both sides of the equation.
Come to think of it this could be implemented using an RSS feed out of Twitter and some code on a server somewhere that knows how to pull the RSS from the server. That would be pretty slick.
In the end I want something so simple I can set it and let it go. I also REALLY want to capture every tweet I’ve ever posted. That, is the biggest deal to me. I want the entire stream.
This post came out of a conversation started where? On Twitter, of course.
Twitter Blog: “TweetDeck is a great example of a third-party developer that designed tools for the incredibly important audience of Twitter power-users and, in turn, created value for the network as a whole.”
From TweetDeck’s website:
TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more.
Revised version:
TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you to
you with your contacts acrossTwitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more.
There, that looks better.
CNN Money: “NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, an application for organizing the display of tweets, for more than $40 million in a mix of cash and stock, according to sources close to the deal.”
I’m not so sure I’d have taken stock as part of that deal, unless it was a very small percentage. 80/20 maybe.
Dan Benjamin [via Twitter]:
Twitter’s strategy: buy the good 3rd party clients while diminishing other 3rd party client user experience until only Twitter remains
That hold water after recent changes that affect how clients access Twitter. Twitter’s own clients do not have to abide by the rules, thus, the user gets a better experience.
All you TweetDeck fans say bye-bye to Facebook, and other, service integration.