The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter

or, in other words: they'll keep on copying stuff other companies, like Tweetmeme, have done with their data so far.

I don't think Twitter can ever really replace RSS/ATOM.

I have a handful of sites I follow (as in really read every update) and Opera having integrated RSS I get a nice reminder popup whenever there's an update. For me Twitter wouldn't work for this as the amount of incoming messages on Twitter is usually to large and it would be distracting.

To be honest I don't really see any problems in the RSS system. I don't really see why enforcing a data format or enforcing limits makes it more usable? I kinda like getting comics delivered straight to my browser's RSS feeds and being able to read blog posts directly in there as well.

Now Twitter would make for an exceptional social RSS where I could find one-of articles related to my interests. Which I guess seems kinda similar to FriendFeed (which I've never used since no one I find interesting is on there) or Hacker News (but without the discussion and a slightly different topic selection).

The main problem I have is that people keep insisting on posting completely uninteresting tweets (such as what they're doing) or using it as a conversation tool. This kind of noise tends to drown its use as a social RSS feed for me.

I think the big difference is usability.

Other than a few techies, no one understands or uses RSS. In fact, even among most of my techie friends, I'm one of the few who actively reads RSS. It just doesn't work right now in terms of "normal" people being able to use it.

And anyway, saying "we already have the web, why do we need Twitter" is wrong. That's like saying "we already have cellphones, why do we need SMS". Different kinds of information tend to have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately Twitter is a business that needs to generate ROI for its investors.

The open API gave them plenty of ideas for functionality and "holes" in their system, and Twitter has made it clear that they need to fill those holes.

The multiple points of entry also showed them that they needed a seamless user experience, which is why they launched their own native Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, launched an iPad app and now relaunched their web interface.

Many of the twitter.com upgrades were built by someone else on some other site first, but it is in Twitter's own interest to use those ideas to get more traffic to twitter.com and ultimately use the traffic to generate revenue.

It is sad to think that Twitter fostered its ecosystem only to strong arm it and chop it down when it was ready to figure out its monetization strategy. But those are the perils of building a business off of someone else's platform.

As a Twitter application developer myself I knew this was a risk, but I have become painfully aware of it over the past few months. I think their current trajectory will eventually kill off a good part of the ecosystem that helped them get to this point.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "why do we need Twitter?". While I consider it a useless service there are obviously a huge amount of people in disagreement with me, which would imply that it serves some purpose. What I am saying is "Why would we need a decentralized, open Twitter?"

As far as RSS being to complicated goes, that (in my eyes) is a failure of browser authors then. Excuse my disconnect from the mainstream browsers, since I've been using Opera exclusively for about 10 years now. But for me subscribing to an RSS feed is a matter of pressing the orange RSS icon in my URL bar, which shows me a clear overview of the history of the feed with a very large subscribe button at the top. The end result is that the feed shows up in a list under (and looking exactly like) my mail filters (sort of like the folders in most common mail clients) including an unread count and notification for new ones, which seems about as simple as it gets.