Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
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Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#2"The new boss, Dick Costolo, realized that if the company wanted to make money, it would need to stop allowing all the food trucks and delivery services from taking everything made at Twitter."
This was not the only option.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#3Ugh. I don't know about the rest of you - that post felt patronizing. This stuff is complicated enough without layering on massive metaphors that shudder under the weight of the context they are trying to convey. It would be awesome if someone took a crack at a similar explanation without all the pandering.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#4Is it me, or does this ridiculous metaphor just make it much, much harder to understand? I'm pretty aware of what's going on with the whole Twitter thing at the moment, and I found this really impenetrable.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#5Is it me, or does this ridiculous metaphor just make it much, much harder to understand? I'm pretty aware of what's going on with the whole Twitter thing at the moment, and I found this really impenetrable.
I'm with you. I've been annoyed with reasoning by analogy and metaphor for a while now, because it's so often bogus.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#6"The people who had come to Twitter in the early days also felt duped, as if they had been told their bite-size snacks were being used to feed everyone on the planet, not to make money...The early Twitter customers and chefs should have realized that eventually Twitter would have to make money. That possibility included advertising."
That's not true. Early adopters (us) knew they needed to make money, but we hoped it wouldn't be at the expense of the people who invested in their success (us).
"The food trucks that had set up shop on the corner, were in some sense, too idealistic, believing they could always get the food coming out of Twitter free."
Not true. It's still free, but no one else can access it. The problem isn't with the cost, but the availability.
"But most of all Twitter, which changed its decisions and strategy midstream, confused almost everyone, often hurting those who helped make Twitter successful and popular."
The only true statement in the entire article.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#7Where this analogy goes totally off the rails (no pun intended) is the suggestion the developer community was called in to help Twitter scale.
> So Twitter came up with a plan: it told people that they could take the food being made in Twitter’s kitchen and give it away by creating new places for people to eat.
Strained analogies aside, that is just completely and utterly backwards. The API was a critical part of Twitter early from day one, and the 3rd-party client ecosystem and extremely high utility of Twitter as microblogging plumbing was arguably what gave Twitter the momentum to cross the chasm.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#8"The new boss, Dick Costolo, realized that if the company wanted to make money, it would need to stop allowing all the food trucks and delivery services from taking everything made at Twitter."
That's a false dichotomy if there ever was one.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#9Ugh. I don't know about the rest of you - that post felt patronizing. This stuff is complicated enough without layering on massive metaphors that shudder under the weight of the context they are trying to convey. It would be awesome if someone took a crack at a similar explanation without all the pandering.
It almost felt like a meta-analogy about the inherent limitations of analogy.
Re: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let's Grab a Bite
#10I don't get why developers are so mad at Twitter. Why is making a Twitter client the only project you can do? If you really can make a piece of software that provides a better experience for Twitter, certainly you have the ability to make something else. And if you're anything like me and every dev I know, you have half a dozen or more project ideas rattling around in your head. Make one of those and let Twitter go.