101–110 of 249 posts
I got put off on using twitter for so long. It was till probably 8 months ago I started using it. And was able to get over their character limit. (which was mostly my reason for not using it)
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Twitter should be owned as a worldwide co-operative at this point, it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.
I'm endlessly amused by the attitude people get over websites they like. I'm not sure what your personal argument for forcing twitter to be a utility is, but I'm sure it would make me laugh. Care to let me know?
Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.
GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.
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We still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service. Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation? My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties. My PhD (in progress) i…
This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat. The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service. Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation? My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties. My PhD (in progress) i…
This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat. The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols t…
Isn't the meme that XMPP is horribly complex and the support for various sub-standards varies hugely?
This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…
How would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.
Twitter only makes sense for public figures. For regular people, nobody on Twitter gives a crap about what you have to say. Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional). To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read ot…
I only got into twitter to follow people I knew in real life; I've ended up following a lot of strangers and public figures and I've made a few friends over it. My wife has made even more friends by tweeting along with TV, especially Eurovision.
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They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?
I am not sure I would call what happens on Twitter discussions. It's a great platform for posting things that are easily misunderstood or taken out of context due to their brevity. Then someone starts a witch-hunt, which in turn sparks a counter-witch-hunt. In the end no one is any wiser, but everyone is little more bitter. I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the serv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat. The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols t…
> we just need people to implement XMPP Isn't the meme that XMPP is horribly complex and the support for various sub-standards varies hugely?
This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…
It's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself. I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).