101–110 of 187 posts
I wouldn't have as much immediate issue with this if Twitter's own clients were acceptable - they are not. And this is an asinine move either way.
Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?
From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp. It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data. It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root. It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down. Proof of concept: https://nstatus.herokuapp…
- open-source - open-standards - free - federated
Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish.
Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers (admission: I am on of these developers).
When you join up you can find me at lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk
>In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”
Some people believe those terms are bullshit, others less so. This argument looks more like shit slinging than anything else.
> So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, that’s OK.
Agreed, it is. Whilst correct, this doesn't prove a lot. I don't think the author is trying to claim they are allowed because they are 'vainglorious masturbatory nonsense', just pointing out that they are. If things you don't agree with can still exist after a new rule is enacted it doesn't make that rule wrong. If only things you don't like can exist because of that rule then maybe it's time to start worrying.
> But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good.
I took a look at these. I'd personally disagree that they are useful or fun. Just my opinion.
> And don’t even get me started on Twitter turning against client apps. For chrissake Twitter’s own app started life as a third-party client.
And this means they should allow third-party clients forever? At a point in their development they obviously weren't putting as much effort into client apps as third-party developers. They decided to focus on that, made some purchases and now are focussing on it. This is part of the risk for third-party developers on any platform, a point which has been made here a number of times.
If I can't use Hootsuite, I can't use twitter.
From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp. It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data. It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root. It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down. Proof of concept: https://nstatus.herokuapp…
Sounds like what you are after is buddycloud ( https://beta.buddycloud.org ), lets list its win points: - open-source - open-standards - free - federated Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish. Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers (admission: I am on of these developers). When you join up you can find me at lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk
Or jump into the https://beta.buddycloud.org/team@topics.buddycloud.org to ask any questions about dev issues.
This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them. The part I disagr…
> Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. This couldn't be further from the truth, and the thousands of copycat networks, not least from Google, are proof that networks can't be commoditized. The only reason I am still on GitHub, Facebook, hn, reddit and Twitter - despite there being better 'products' and 'infrastructure'- is because everybody else is, and the same app…
Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5 years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple! It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or Pakistan as it is in New York or London.…
Would love to see a screenshot (or picture?) of that!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any. Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours. The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage automa…
There are many. Email is a particularly notable example. Luckily, the technology sector wasn't run by "entrepreneurs" back when email was invented, or we would have wound up with walled gardens there too (Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users and contacts can't be exported, etc).
Email and the Internet won because the sector was competitive enough that no one service had enough market clout to not offer e-mail. Once some people got e-mail accounts, other people wanted to e-mail them, and threatened to move off the services that didn't support it in favor of services that did. That scared the online services, so rather than lose, they all started offering e-mail themselves, until they lost anyway.
If you want open social-networking platforms, the solution is to make the market competitive enough that no company can afford not to be open. Usually that'd involve choosing to use the smaller players until they're big enough that no one company is gigantic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?
The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!