All of which leaves me puzzled about why Google first bought and then, essentially, dumped Jaiku.
jamtoday
· 9 months ago
I'm keeping the faith that a revised Jaiku + App Engine could lead to a very interesting sort of "coral reef" that would compete for the hearts and minds of Twitter devs.
dave
· 9 months ago
They were pretty clear about it at the time -- they were buying the company to get the engineers, to work on their mobile platform, which has since shipped -- Android.
xiaoxiao
· 9 months ago
I guess that makes sense. I liked Jaiku, especially the threading.
Wonder why they've not open sourced the Jaiku S60 client as they've done with the rest of the platform.
Jason
· 9 months ago
140 characters gives Twitter 20 characters of their own name and stuff to play with when forwarding texts to cellphones, which seems to have been the initial purpose of Twitter, to be able to send and receive mass text updates. Wouldn't removing links or upping the limit make Twitter updates less textable?
seo wales
· 9 months ago
There are still ways to trim down on twitter. 1) Out of band information gives you one saving - you get the text from the twitter phone number, you don't need it to say anything in the body to know where it originates, 2 characters at most "t:" as a precursor. 2) Limit links posted to 255 a day and use a delimiter to show links, eg you post a link first, it gets addressed as "*01" (using hex, up to *FF) then you use that as a reference in your tweet. That is both the origin and * reference are used as the key. That's all I can think of without having a twitter client to de-compress the text.
vitorcon
· 9 months ago
I think that I understand what Schmidt is saying. He is talking about the conversational aspect of twitter. And in this line it makes sense.
Yes, email is private and one to one, while twitter is public and one to many. But before the Internet days we had BBSs and they worked just like email but where you had one inbox for private messages and lots of inboxes for public messages and discussion. They worked like an email program works today but with lots of public discussion.
One of the interesting things that I've been seing happening in my use of twitter is that I've been reconnecting with a lot of former BBS friends I had, and we are talking in twitter just like we used to talk on those old BBS forums and chats.
bowenmark
· 9 months ago
The character limit AFAIK is due to the limits of a text message on your cell phone.
I tend to treat Twitter as I would the person sitting on the other side of the desk, someone to let know what's going on and possibly, maybe, get a response back. The same for the receiving end, the best ones are the ones that just let me know what someone is doing or thinking.
Bob La Quey
· 9 months ago
Normaally you have great imagination ... but <quote> I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email.
1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one. 2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private. </quote>
But before the blog and now I have been an active participant in email lists that are many-to-many. They are both more interactive than blogs and more peer-to-peer both of which I prefer ... but because, I guess, of the difficulty of setting them up the HTTP blog has taken over.
These lists are by default public.
For me the real value in twitter is two fold. First for whatever reason it has large and growing audience. Second we can use it to provide a real time notification service (with links for callbacks) for networked embedded systems. Twitter itself will likely be replaced by a UDP based service for this latter use but for the moment twitter exists and can be used.
jfobes
· 9 months ago
I love this one! So many insights. And the coral reef as accretion of knowledge in tiny corpuscular 140-bit units. Thanks for suggesting that Schmidt isn't just stupid, and for thinking the game through. Like you said about Atul: You da man -- at least this time ;)
anonymous coward
· 9 months ago
I certainly know people who use twitter primarily for its direct-messaging.
aarondelcohen
· 9 months ago
microsoft took the the threat from netscape seriously and moved "browser war" into the cycle. In the end, they would have done better to focus on search, but they did take that seriously.
Stefano J. Attardi
· 9 months ago
Ahem, Netscape came first. It was Netscape that had a huge market share. It was Microsoft who started the browser war, and won it.
BryanThatcher
· 9 months ago
yeah but MS won by pushing out the competitor because they owned the "hardware" world ie being pre-installed. This is different, neither product/service is pre installed, you have to choose and you will migrate towards the platform that your friends are on, no?
Scot
· 9 months ago
"Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one" - Most emails I get are one to many.
"If Google is preparing their own Twitter, what will it look like?" - They already have their own Twitter since they bought Jaiku.
"... Schmidt also called Twitter's success "wonderful," praised the company for its innovation ..." "... his comments have encouraged further speculation the search giant may try to purchase Twitter in the coming months." "... Google chief wondered aloud if Twitter will eventually be forced to "evolve" into something beyond ..." "...Schmidt also discussed the possibility of traditional e-mail services trying to incorporate a Twitter feature into Google's own systems." "...has been recent speculation that Google may buy Twitter because of its potential threat to Google's core search business." Article notes that hashtag phenomenon has created an alternate search tool.
Jim Posner
· 9 months ago
Twitter is to email as a baseball bat is to football. Google has a proven track record of not understanding real time networks. I hope that changes and that Google applies it's native intelligence to improving real time networks.
playerx
· 9 months ago
I assume he is saying is that Twitter lowered the bar for easier entry into the world of Electronic Messaging(e-mail) for all.
But if Twitter = Poor mans (public) email, then MajorDomo = one of Twitter's earliest Open competitors.
KevinCTofel
· 9 months ago
I'm starting to use Twitter for logging and tracking my exercise. When I go for a run or ride, I tweet the info with a #kct-log tag for search purposes. I'm also hoping the "one to many" effect helps motivate others to get a little excercise as well ;)
spryka
· 9 months ago
I am surprised and shocked over what Schmidt said.. I did not expect this sort of arrogance from Google.. Twitter is a great tool to meet like minded people and has potential for search as well.. it just needs a viable business model..
my opinion, based on my interview with the father of gmail
zeitguy
· 9 months ago
I don't think "poor man's e-mail" actually makes any sense, and I don't search for sense in malaprops just because they have credentials behind the speaker's name. Twitter is a buzz, and its strength lies deep in the amygdala, where emotion and the boundaries of the self rub together with attention from other people and a sense of the moment. It can be dismissed as cocktail party chatter, but think about all the affairs, careers, families and industries affected by cocktail chatter on a regular basis. Length of text is not as important as the agility of the connection, which is able to gracefully discard unwanted attention as easily as it is able to plug into to the next attractive socket. Pardon the expression.
Twitter is a liquid weave of momentary attention. Good tweets stain deeper and farther than others, but they all are part of a flow that cannot be cut to measure and wholesaled. If you have felt the buzz, you know it isn't going to be bulldogged into a commodity very easily, and it isn't going to be parsed by competitive intelligence methods in any meaningful way.
As I said when I first heard Schmidt's shot: "Twitter is an honest man's e-mail. Who has more than 140 characters of info that is really worth imposing on others?"
Jon Husband
· 9 months ago
1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one.
It is also just as much many-to-one, and you get to pick what you want to pay attention to or not (you knew this).
malatmals
· 9 months ago
Poor mans? Does he know the cost of SMS messages? Anyhow googles too smug, Twitters too smug. It speaks of a deal in the works. EW sold his last venture to google which gives him a level of 'inness'. Why turn down $500,000,000? Cuz there's a bigger fish in the pond. As for a business model think eyeballs. Advertisers now take a shotgun approach. But when they know who, where, when and what's watching they can bid in realtime for those impressions... There's a superbowl sized audience all the time on the web...
Mayson
· 9 months ago
Maybe not a poor man's email - but definitely a poor man's listserv.
sameasiteverwas
· 9 months ago
Twitter isn't the poor man's email. Twitter is IM with an audience.
Richard Cunningham
· 9 months ago
I think this just shows that they *still* don't understand social networking.
gmail essentially came very late to the game - a long time after email was established and even a long time after yahoo mail and hotmail got popular.
The social networking on youtube is awful.
They bought Jaiku, only to stop developing it after not getting anywhere.
K.D.
· 9 months ago
It's interesting that I find Taotao.com, which is the Twitter-like website from QQ in China, has already offered 200 characters, and this move did work. It helps taotao.com to beat other microblogging services with 140 characters,such as fanfou.com and jiwai.de. Of course, the huge user base of QQ is another key to taotao's success.
kevinpang
· 9 months ago
Twitter is the CB of the internet
Mac
· 9 months ago
"If Twitter had established a history of quick feature upgrades it would be a different story, but there were no new features in 2008, and so far none in 2009."
Does the addition of search (via the acquisition of Summize) not count as a new feature? It certainly seems like one to me. I believe (but am not sure) that there were also some additions to the API in 2008.
Rakesh
· 9 months ago
Twitter for me is -
1. Micro blog 2. SMS 3. River of news (esp the breaking variety) 4. Public IM 5. Reverse wall/scrapbook 6. Email (via DM) 7. Social bookmarking tool
Maybe I could think of more, but definitely not the poorer cousin of anything!
Rob Hof
· 9 months ago
Interesting post, especially on how Twitter could evolve. As for Schmidt, if you look at the video of his answer, he doesn't come off as arrogant, at least to me. He comes off more as just asking an honest question: Will Twitter *and the like* (which is probably why he also said 160 characters, the max length of SMS messages, right?) would remain some kind of independent service or become part of (or develop itself) a larger set of related services? I don't know yet, but as your post indicates, it's a good question. I know from talking with Google folks that they are definitely paying attention to Twitter. Whether they can do anything about it besides write a big check is something else.
bonchibuji
· 9 months ago
or better, lets call Twitter as the busy man's email!
Abhishek Kumar
· 9 months ago
snail mail evolved into email. and now we have twitter. what's next?
abhitux
· 9 months ago
Well if google launches its own Twitter or rather a twitter like service,Twitter will obviously be under pressure to compete with a web biggie like Google.So that would also mean that twitter would also bring about some big changes in its services.Google is known to be a winner when it pioneers something,but as far as competing with existing products is concerned Google is a little weak.I mean to say Google Chrome,Lively,google Knol didn't do that well as compared to other Google products.I suppose twitter will be a tough nut to crack for google or even microsoft(if it plans on doing so).
michaeljpastor
· 9 months ago
It's global chat room. At least, it's an IM:CC service. At most, it's a chat room without borders. At worst it's a room where everyone is talking and nobody is listening. At best, it's an IM relay service between legacy IM networks. So far, it's none of the above and it will suffer until it finds its niche or the bubble pops, which will be soon.
George Coates
· 9 months ago
Poetry as a communications meme is catching on.
Today is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's birthday. He the last of the san francisco beat poets. BetterBadNews has posted an off beat homage to him.
If you have any contacts who can forward this video link to Ferlinghetti while it's still his birthday it's greatly appreciated.
All Comments
to get the engineers, to work on their mobile platform, which has since
shipped -- Android.
Wonder why they've not open sourced the Jaiku S60 client as they've done with the rest of the platform.
1) Out of band information gives you one saving - you get the text from the twitter phone number, you don't need it to say anything in the body to know where it originates, 2 characters at most "t:" as a precursor.
2) Limit links posted to 255 a day and use a delimiter to show links, eg you post a link first, it gets addressed as "*01" (using hex, up to *FF) then you use that as a reference in your tweet. That is both the origin and * reference are used as the key.
That's all I can think of without having a twitter client to de-compress the text.
Yes, email is private and one to one, while twitter is public and one to many. But before the Internet days we had BBSs and they worked just like email but where you had one inbox for private messages and lots of inboxes for public messages and discussion. They worked like an email program works today but with lots of public discussion.
One of the interesting things that I've been seing happening in my use of twitter is that I've been reconnecting with a lot of former BBS friends I had, and we are talking in twitter just like we used to talk on those old BBS forums and chats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_serv...
<quote>
I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email.
1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one.
2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private.
</quote>
But before the blog and now I have been an active participant in email lists that are many-to-many. They are both more interactive than blogs and more peer-to-peer both of which I prefer ... but because, I guess, of the difficulty of setting them up the HTTP blog has taken over.
These lists are by default public.
For me the real value in twitter is two fold. First for whatever reason it has large and growing audience. Second we can use it to provide a real time notification service (with links for callbacks) for networked embedded systems. Twitter itself will likely be replaced by a UDP based service for this latter use but for the moment twitter exists and can be used.
"If Google is preparing their own Twitter, what will it look like?" - They already have their own Twitter since they bought Jaiku.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030409-go...
"... Schmidt also called Twitter's success "wonderful," praised the company for its innovation ..."
"... his comments have encouraged further speculation the search giant may try to purchase Twitter in the coming months."
"... Google chief wondered aloud if Twitter will eventually be forced to "evolve" into something beyond ..."
"...Schmidt also discussed the possibility of traditional e-mail services trying to incorporate a Twitter feature into Google's own systems."
"...has been recent speculation that Google may buy Twitter because of its potential threat to Google's core search business."
Article notes that hashtag phenomenon has created an alternate search tool.
But if Twitter = Poor mans (public) email, then MajorDomo = one of Twitter's earliest Open competitors.
http://www.twitter.com/spryka
Twitter is a liquid weave of momentary attention. Good tweets stain deeper and farther than others, but they all are part of a flow that cannot be cut to measure and wholesaled. If you have felt the buzz, you know it isn't going to be bulldogged into a commodity very easily, and it isn't going to be parsed by competitive intelligence methods in any meaningful way.
As I said when I first heard Schmidt's shot: "Twitter is an honest man's e-mail. Who has more than 140 characters of info that is really worth imposing on others?"
It is also just as much many-to-one, and you get to pick what you want to pay attention to or not (you knew this).
gmail essentially came very late to the game - a long time after email was established and even a long time after yahoo mail and hotmail got popular.
The social networking on youtube is awful.
They bought Jaiku, only to stop developing it after not getting anywhere.
Does the addition of search (via the acquisition of Summize) not count as a new feature? It certainly seems like one to me. I believe (but am not sure) that there were also some additions to the API in 2008.
1. Micro blog
2. SMS
3. River of news (esp the breaking variety)
4. Public IM
5. Reverse wall/scrapbook
6. Email (via DM)
7. Social bookmarking tool
Maybe I could think of more, but definitely not the poorer cousin of anything!
and now we have twitter.
what's next?
Today is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's birthday. He the last of the
san francisco beat poets. BetterBadNews has posted an off
beat homage to him.
If you have any contacts who can forward this video
link to Ferlinghetti while it's still his birthday it's greatly appreciated.
www.betterbadnews.blip.tv
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZPNTWGZ5Wg
thanks
George Coates