Scripting News - Latest Comments in Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

George Coates — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:06:04 -0000

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.

www.betterbadnews.blip.tv

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZP...

thanks

George Coates

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

michaeljpastor — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:14:11 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

seo wales — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:11:09 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Bryan Thatcher — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:17:39 -0000

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?

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

abhitux — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:04:18 -0000

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).

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Abhishek Kumar — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:39:30 -0000

snail mail evolved into email.
and now we have twitter.
what's next?

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

bonchibuji — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:19:43 -0000

or better, lets call Twitter as the busy man's email!

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Rob Hof — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:35:03 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Rakesh — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:08:17 -0000

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!

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Mac — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:41:24 -0000

"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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Kevin Pang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:21:37 -0000

Twitter is the CB of the internet

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

kd — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:18:04 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Richard Cunningham — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:46:15 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Guest — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:09:21 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

sameasiteverwas — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:08:52 -0000

Twitter isn't the poor man's email. Twitter is IM with an audience.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Stefano J. Attardi — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:45:43 -0000

Ahem, Netscape came first. It was Netscape that had a huge market share. It was Microsoft who started the browser war, and won it.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Mayson — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:29:04 -0000

Maybe not a poor man's email - but definitely a poor man's listserv.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

malatmals — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:42:10 -0000

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...

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Jon Husband — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:30:59 -0000

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).

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:21:44 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

zeitguy — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:06:51 -0000

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?"

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Andrew Warner — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:05:57 -0000

my opinion, based on my interview with the father of gmail

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

jamtoday — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:05:46 -0000

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.

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

spryka — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:01:51 -0000

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..

http://www.twitter.com/spryka

Re: Poor man's email? (Scripting News)

Guest — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:39:33 -0000

All of which leaves me puzzled about why Google first bought and then, essentially, dumped Jaiku.