DISQUS

Scripting News: Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal (Scripting News)

  • fredwilson · 8 months ago
    nothing is "it"

    not even google

    we eat our young in the tech business dave
  • joelfox · 8 months ago
    i agree.
  • dave · 8 months ago
    Good point.
  • Phil Baumann · 8 months ago
    Agree with metadata off tweets.

    If Twitter would offer a tagging feature (where I can append a tag outside of the tweet versus the clutter and limits of hashtags), Twitter's search would be enhanced. It may seem to 'break' the 140 limit, but tagging would bring an important layer of human interpretation to Twitter. Of course, it all depends on the calibre of the brain behind the tweet.
  • AndrewBurton · 8 months ago
    "If Twitter would offer a tagging feature..."

    This is why I dislike Twitter. People are waiting for Twitter to deliver something that RSS 2.0 already has. I'm perpetually flummoxed by the adoration of Twitter, when it's essentially just a centralized repository of what boils down to RSS feeds.
  • tweetip · 8 months ago
    Phil - tagging outside twitter - we're doing that. http://tweetip.us/lkyua
  • Sam Adams · 8 months ago
  • openworld · 8 months ago
    Dave,

    Yes to all of the above.

    Another value-add would help. Twitter (or a third party) could provide an dynamic 3D view of posts by the Tweeps that one follows -- and of posts by the Tweeps that _they_ track. See the interactive "map" view at http://debategraph.org .

    Mark Frazier
    @openworld (twitter)
  • danlyke · 8 months ago
    Hmmm... I like twitter (vs Facebook) because I get that sense of connection that comes from short updates on people's lives. I get to read that the nephew is walking, first words, the frustrations various people are having, without them or me having to invest huge time in weblog posts or emails or phone conversations that try to be important.

    But I'm also rabidly and rapidly un-following people who embed lots of links or use Twitter as a sort of RSS feed for their weblogs. Twitter's RSS feed is like a slow motion IRC of mundane stuff for people whose lives I'm taking an interest in. I think, probably because there's less opportunity for a business model there, that use is what most people are scoffing at.
  • mlougee · 8 months ago
    Good piece in the NYTimes this morning, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/technology/in..., raising similar questions. VERY interesting was notion of machine-to-Twitter (or Twitter-like) automatic activity, eg medical-device sensors triggering brief msgs when vital signs go wrong. That could be game-changing for medical research based on populations, as well as clinical improvements for a single person.
  • dave · 8 months ago
    Right, and it's not clear that any human being needs to see the message
    being transported.

    This goes back to the idea of comparing Twitter to a coral reef.

    http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/04/28/twi...
  • kidmercury · 8 months ago
    IMO the big problem is that the startup ecosystem hasn't addressed the platform issue yet. an open platform that lets people precisely manage their own social graph is needed. twitter is exciting because i think it signals what one of the features within what an open platform will look like (i.e. micromessaging), and how people will use it in the context of their social graph. the problem i have with twitter in specific is that i don't see how it is going to make the kind of money it needs to to be exciting. IMO the big money is going to be in the platform, and the platform will dictate how apps like twitter are financed and developed.
  • dave · 8 months ago
    I don't think the excitement *should* be in the platform, any more than
    Windows or Mac OS is exciting, they aren't. The excitement should be in the
    layers we build on the core. First the apps, then the things users do with
    the apps and on and on. If any layer doesn't show through enough power that
    just means the cursor eventually has to move somewhere else.
  • kidmercury · 8 months ago
    i think the excitement is in the social graph -- i.e. how each person classifies their relationships. for instance, some people will want to follow you on twitter as a news source; others may want to follow you because you are a personal friend of theirs. then there will be tweets/micromessages which you would want to direct to some usergroups, but not to others. i think the right social platform is the one that is going to let you truly manage your social graph (i.e. classify your contacts, assign permissions, and process all data to auto-adjust classifications as needed). all the social networking features are subservient to the social graph, which is why i think we may not get anywhere until we get the box that lets us precisely manage all our contacts and how we relate to them.
  • vk77de · 8 months ago
    This 'open platform' in social networking will be open source P2P. Mobile device to mobile device directly.
    In this way no other nice people contol your social network and own your data.

    You should be in control.

    All the best,

    Victor

    Twittering as vk77de
  • Hal O'Brien · 8 months ago
    I'm somewhat surprised you haven't written about #amazonfail yet, since it's at the intersection of Twitter and Amazon, and I know you're interested in both.

    #amazonfail may well have long-lasting repercussions among Amazon’s core constituencies — both readers and writers.
    Certainly one suspects Wall Street thinks so. In the three days since #amazonfail broke, AMZN stock is down $5.06/share, underperforming the Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ. Jeff Bezos is personally down $491 million. Amazon’s market cap is down $2.2 billion. The stock got downgraded today.

    It’ll be interesting to see what’s happened to their cash flow.
  • dave · 8 months ago
    I have been traveling so haven't been paying much attention to this stuff.
  • Chris Baskind · 8 months ago
    I'd love to see this stuff baked into Twitter, but "payloads" could be layered on top of the existing and displayed through a client in exactly the same way that some already expand short URLs. Compose through the client with whatever you want: rich text, multimedia -- anything. Semantic tags are automatically applied. Sent to Twitter. There's a one-line summary and a short URL for anyone working outside the client -- it redirects to an outside site and displays the content. But people using the client see it inline, and can reply or process it accordingly. Search engine is built into the client and third party site.