-
Website
http://www.scripting.com/ -
Original page
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/12/07/theSpaceBetweenTwitterAndF.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
p.s. - shameless plea: please vote for us to carry on the YouTube revolution in the Open Web Awards (http://blog.ffwd.com/?p=100)
I don't think so because Twitter is all about users writing content. It's not just the visual effects, like you say. Twitter doesn't offer RSS aggregation support like FF does and that's a huge handicap, IMO.
I wouldn't place a bet on the niche you're describing. Simple text retains enormous appeal. Even teens and twenty somethings who speak fluent-audio visual and who live on Skype, YouTube, iPhones, and various live video streams remain loyal to SMS. They're arriving on Twitter by the minute. And they're quite content to use Twitter as an alert system to their various rich media presences.
IMHO the gap you see between stripped down Twitter and kitchen-sink FF isn't likely to draw much of a crowd.
to lead to sheep. Not thrown, not pictured, not sheared. And no sparkly roses.
I'm visual by nature, but the minimalism of twittr leaves room for the massive idea flow
to populate the neighborhood.
it doesn't even consume twitter cpu cycles... the url can open in an <iframe>
or they can outsource the service to one of those url previewers startups like Snap
the problem with friendfeed is that too many friends generate an awful lot of content, and it's harder to parse random bits of information in different formats on a single unformatted stream.
if you had an interface with separate 'lanes' for each data type, now that would be different.
you get Friendfeed, without the clutter. there you would be effectively going bidimensional
Twitter is unidimensional. Friendfeed is 2 dimensions deflated to fit in one dimension like a world map.
there again, this would confirm your theory:
Twitter = command line = unidimensional.
Friendfeed = 2d GUI = bidimensional.
That being said, we already have Plurk, which already has a bidimensional design.
The problem with Plurk is that its implementation is very counterintuitive, with the time axis flowing in the opposite direction than is usually the convention. ( for westerners reading text from left to right, reading comics from left to right, opening books from left to right, etc.)
Friendfeed (or a third party?) should find a way to design a portrait mode, bidimensional layout, with 'lanes' for different data types on a single time axis (vertical axis for time, just like in twitter, newer posts at the top)
what do you think ?
IT is sometimes used to mean "data transmission" technology. Information has to do with a change in "knowledge state" (so displaying an image to a blind user is data transmission, not information).
Information is what matters most -- and for the forseeable future (whether the next couple decades or the next couple centuries), information processing will remain largely a matter of processing text (i.e. in terms of the linguistic data: quite strongly/abstractly codified representations of language).
But I agree: Once you've made sure the data is not garbage, then it should be output in a manner that is "usable" to the "user" -- just like a houses are not necessarily homes.
;) nmw
By the way, I am old enough to have lived through the DOS vs. WYSIWYG days in the 80's. It was a wild time, and I enjoyed the ride back then like I'm enjoying this new ride now!
Judi (http://twitter.com/JudiWunderlich)
Initially Twitter could develop this internally to support links pointing to a handful of sites like YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google / Yahoo! Maps, etc (including bit.ly / tinyurl redirect links that eventually land on those sites). Overtime, they could open it up and allow website owners to specify what media snippets to display based on their specific URL structure... similar to how Yahoo! Search Monkey lets site owners enhance their web search listings with enhanced media snippets.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/...
FriendFeed is missing some things, though. It's like Windows 2.0. You can see it's going to be a big deal, but it is too rough for it to be a big deal yet.
What does it need?
The minute it gives me the ability to build new kinds of news displays for you, by talking to it in real English, it will take off like a rocket.
For instance, someone asked for a "simple" display. So, why couldn't I ask the database for that? "Please build me a display without any of the power features like "like" or "comment" or "more.""
How about a way to study what happened on Election night? "Please build me a display that shows me all messages that contained either the word 'Obama' or 'McCain' on November 4, 2008, but only show me items that had two or more 'Likes" or two or more 'Comments'".
Imagine that you could do that. I can and when it does that it will take off and Om and all the other naysayers will be left with an obsolete system and will be trying to figure out how to gain followers.
And since you've already brought up PC vs Mac, let me suggest another religious comparison: FriendFeed is like Drupal, and Twitter is like Wordpress. While FriendFeed users rant about the power and flexibility of their awesome theoretical framework, Twitter does it's job in a clear, straightforward manner, and everybody ends up using it.
So I hope that we'll see an enhanced Twitter that fills in this middle ground. The addition of graphics would certainly be welcome, I can't see why that would harm the simplicity of Twitter. It's the discussion features of FF that get it started going off in too many directions from me to keep up with it.
An 8.6 on the Snark-tor scale.. :-)
In other words, I don't think it's about simplicity at all. I've invited non-techie/non-geeky friends to both Twitter and Friendfeed, and I haven't heard once "Oh, but Friendfeed is confusing! Too many options!" Nope. If anything, Twitter's limitations IMHO tend to be *more* frustrating and confusing than Friendfeed's.
I would guess there's a space for such a service or upgrade to twitter, but I am happy with Friendfeed right now.
The fact that you want a richer interface without the conversation features is kind of odd to me, as conversation on Twitter is pretty much ridiculous. You guys are all used to how Twitter works, though. Your friends are there. Digging through a stream of unconnected "tweets" to follow a conversation is ok, I guess. I prefer the conversation to all be in one place around the discussion piece, though. Kinda like how this post is set up.
Another thing I think we're forgetting is that Twitter can't handle anything else. Did they bring track back yet? What about IM? Did they just shut down SMS in some areas? I really don't see them implementing any type of embedded media because I don't think they can afford the load and I don't think it would translate well for the average user, who is used to basically passing text messages back and forth.
For those who insist on directly comparing Twitter and FriendFeed. Please stop. It's apples and oranges. The x-factor being the threaded conversations. As Dave points out, this is a deal-breaker for him and I'm sure it's the reason others find FriendFeed to be "too much".
If you delete all the conversation threads, convert all images and media to links, and truncate all the posts to 140 chars, FriendFeed would look a lot more familiar to tweeters, but what fun would it be then?
1. A twitter client (twhirl, tweetdeck, etc) that interprets each incoming link and displays it appropriately, using the client's cpu and connection.
2. A greasemonkey script that does the same for the web client, perhaps using an IFRAME control or some more elaborate logic to inject the resulting object into the web client's twitterstream.
It's a webapp that sync contacts between Twitter and FF. It's written in Python and deployed on Google's AppEngine. As a user of both services, I think you'd find it useful.
twitter's versatility has pushed its usage beyond status updates and into sharing, even though it is not as full-featured as richer specialized platforms (e.g. delicious or diigo for bookmarks, flickr for pictures, etc.).
FriendFeed brilliantly aggregates all of these online activities in one place/one feed. There will come a time when they will bring to market a tweetdeck-type lifestreaming filter that makes sense of it all.
e.g. www.tinyurl.com/breadcrumbz
Another important bit to Friendfeed is the way it nests conversations. I know with Twitter I always feel like I'm missing context when it comes to replies, and the only solution is to keep clicking those "in reply to" links. So another important part would be to show "in reply to" messages right above replies.
I've actually started working on this as a project called Tweetree, and an initial working release is up at tweetree.com. I think there's a lot of potential to create a rich, graphical interface to the Twitter backend, using the FF model you've described here.