Twitter is Pivoting

I hate to be that (negative) guy, but I'm starting to get really tired of Dalton constantly pissing all over twitter. Particularly because he's competing against them. I'm an App.net backer, and I think it's cool what he's doing, but FFS, let someone else carry the water, if it even needs carrying at all. This all just feels really petty and whiney, particularly when you're already at work solving the problem.

Of all the rhetorical points that Dalton makes, this one was the most damning for me:

>>> His announcement was formatted as a direct reply to the official Twitter account.

This means the announcement would only be seen by his followers that also follow the official Twitter account. I don’t get the feeling he did this on purpose. An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so that his followers would see it. >>

It seems a bit pedantic. But when top-down leaders don't get even the basic details of their operations right, then there are a lot of other big-picture things that they seem to get wrong as well. In the case of MySpace's crushing defeat by Facebook, the difference really was in the details, not in the overall ambitions of the two companies.

So building a Bootstrap-based Twitter clone is doing things "the hard way"? That's an interesting point of view.

Ok, third comment here, guess the previous two comments (memesisj and jamesmoss) pretty much define 'polarizing' :-)

Dalton raises some interesting questions. What exactly is twitter ? And perhaps more importantly what does Twitter think it can become? The churn in API restrictions, usage and messages certainly can be confusing.

Perhaps a true commercial social network is a contradiction in terms; the friction from the user=product formula necessarily becoming unbearable with time. Perhaps an open source non profit solution wil have suited it much better.