There are a lot of reasons I took the opportunity to sell Birdfeed when I did—the personal toll the bruising iPhone Twitter client market was taking on me, imminent financial concerns, the opportunity to be an early employee at Square—but without a doubt, my perception of an emerging, strong product direction at Twitter played a big part.
It’s silly to say, but I still miss using Birdfeed. Twitterrific works wondefully, but nothing quite has the elegance Birdfeed did.
I’ve seen this quote by Dave Winer a few times today (in my RSS reader):
Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? SImple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares.
Scripting News: How to reboot RSS
Me, I want to see almost no links on Twitter. For me, Twitter is for keeping up with people I want to keep up with, and by design it’s an on-the-go medium. If I’m checking my timeline waiting for a Metro train, I’m probably not ready to read a long article that might come in as a link, and I’ll probably forget to look at it later (though Instapaper helps with that). When I open up my RSS reader I know I’m going to find some things that I want to sit down and read. Blogs, Google Reader, Buzz, etc. are for sharing stuff. Twitter is for sharing thoughts.
Sunnydale Tweets is an acting troupe that’s performing Buffy the Vampire Slayer over Twitter in real time. They’re about to start season four. The Twitter account @sunnydaletweets is friends with all of the players if you want to follow along.
Twitter will soon provide an official way to retweet. From the sketch they showed, I liked this implementation. Instead of junking up my timeline with the noise of “RT: @username”, I’ll just see the referenced post. Much better.
To add to my argument that one shouldn’t clutter up one’s Twitter account with information that’s better delivered by RSS, del.icio.us now allows you to spam your Twitter account with every site you bookmark. If done (im)properly, I’ll now get to your bookmarks in my RSS reader, my Twitter client, and my del.icio.us network!
Blogger’s website today advertises a “Tweet Your Blog” service from Twitterfeed, whereby you can have it automatically post a tweet whenever you write a blog post. In other words, you can fill up your Twitter account with crap more easily!
But let me back up for a moment…
I’m a firm believe that things have their place, even on the internet. One shouldn’t, for example, send an email requesting information one needs immediately. That’s what phone calls are for. We all pay $50+ a month to carry a cell phone everywhere we go so we can be reached immediately if needed. Email, Facebook messages, instant messages, etc. all require the recipient to be at his computer. Even with text messages and push updates, the user has to have a phone that supports them and has to hear the single beep announcing them.
Messaging in general has a hierarchy:
The thesis here being that various communication media have their positives and negatives, and working within the constraints of what they were designed to do tends to be the best way to go.
Weblogs have a companion system designed to help people find out when they’ve posted an update: RSS. If you like a weblog, you should subscribe to its RSS feed. If you don’t use RSS already, go sign up for Google Reader. It’ll keep track of the sites you like and show you their updates with an hour or so of them being published. No need to go check each website yourself.
So if I’ve done what I’m supposed to do and subscribed to your blog in my RSS reader, I’ll see your new post next time I check it. But if you’re using something like Blogger’s Twitterfeed recommendation, and I follow you on Twitter, too, I’m going to end up seeing your post twice. Though often criticized for being filled with useless patter, a carefully curated Twitter feed contains good information you want to read from your friends. Fill that up with “Check out my new blog post!” links to posts you’re already going to see in your RSS reader, and the signal-to-noise ratio starts to skew. (And all those retweets.)
Poor Twitter is already victim to too much misuse. It wisely kept its service very open at the start, which let people design some cool extensions and applications for it1, but also left it open, like many previously useful services, to being ruined by marketers, companies, politicians, etc. Twitter’s greatest value is in being able to keep an open chatroom with your friends. You can also use it to read celebrity’s tweets, and that’s fun, but it becomes a thin, one-way experience if that’s all you use it for. Is there any reason you’d want to read a newspaper’s tweets? Shouldn’t you just buy the paper or go to its website? Yes, a corporation can try to get in on the hot new thing by creating a Twitter feed, but the chance that it’s going to provide anything other than a shallow marketing channel is pretty small. Twitter’s for sharing thoughts, and companies don’t have those. People do.
Discussing my idea that Twitter clients should show one’s friends’ favorites on another blog, I’ve learned that this (like many things) is easier said than done. Twitter doesn’t provide a way for a program to say, “give me all of [username]’s friends’ favorites”. Instead, a program would have to ask, “who are [username]’s friends?”, then make a request for the favorites for each person individually, then stitch them together into the timeline. So, more like an RSS reader polling a number of different feeds. It could work, but it’d be more complicated, barring Twitter standardizing this sort of query.
I stand by the notion that there’s untapped potential in the ability to mark a post as a favorite. My guess is that not many people ever star a tweet, or even know you can, and I think this is because doing so doesn’t do a whole lot right now.
Flickr adds Twitter integration
You can set up a special email address that you can send a photo to from your phone which will post it to Flickr and send a link to Twitter.
I think Twitter clients should adopt a new practice: show me tweets that people I follow mark as “favorites” in my timeline. Most clients already provide a view that shows me posts from my friends, replies to me, and my direct messages. Favorites are fairly underutilized by Twitter clients. Favrd collects tweets that have been starred by multiple people for some fairly entertaining reading, but mostly I don’t have easy access to posts that my friends mark as favorites, and it’d likely be interesting information.
In fact, I think it could eliminate the need for the practice of “retweeting”. Right now, if a friend of a friend posts something he thinks is worth sharing, my friend might repost that tweet so that his friends (me including) can see it. So if my friend’s friend has posted this:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
My friend’s retweet, using the most popular syntax, might read:
RT @username: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
(I don’t particularly like that syntax. I don’t think it’s very intuitive. “RT” is an acronym that’s completely unique to Twitter, so it’s unlikely a new user will figure out that it means “retweet”. And even if they do, it’s not a term that very adequately describes what’s going on, that my friend is quoting one of his friend’s tweets. I’d prefer something like:
“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” — @username
…but I digress.)
Syntax issues aside, retweeting adds lot of clutter to Twitter. Imagine that I follow 20 friends, and many of those follow someone else who I don’t know. If that someone else posts something retweet-worthy, I end up seeing the same quote 15 times on my timeline. And likely not all 15 at once. Maybe 10 within a few minutes of the original, then 4 more an hour later, and maybe the last one three days later when that person gets back from vacation. So I get a quote from someone I don’t follow that keeps echoing across my timeline. Even worse, sometimes people retweet retweets. (None of this is a problem I’m personally having with my friends on Twitter, but it’s not hypothetical.)
It’s not that there isn’t value in retweeting. It’s good to point out that you like what someone else wrote. That’s what social networking is about. But I think there’s a better way to show your appreciation for someone, and I think using Twitter’s preexisting favorite feature is the way to do it. For one, it’s more persistent. You can go to twitter.com/username/favorites and see every public post that user’s ever starred. A retweeted post will disappear off the front page over time with nothing differentiating it from any other post authored by the retweeter, but there’s a record of a favorite.
How could Twitter clients present favorites more… favorably? I picture that Twitterrific would probably throw them inline with the rest of my friends’ posts, but in a different color. Tweetie would probably add a star icon to the left sidebar. Birdfeed would do something subtle, I’m sure. (It’s a playground!) Potentially the clients could scrape some metadata and come up with a clever way to show who marked that tweet as a favorite, or represent visually how many people had marked it. Maybe they’d bump it up top whenever a new friend starred it, or maybe it’d be better to keep it at the timestamp of the original post (something a retweet can’t represent).
So, summary: marking a post as a favorite shows that you like it. Twitter doesn’t support a good way to get that “this is good” message out to your friends. Twitter clients could easily represent this information. Doing this would obviate the need to share that you like a post by retweeting it, which adds noise, too much of which makes it hard to find the good stuff. Marking someting as a favorite also conveys more information than a retweet, because it can be aggregated and found later. Just an idea, but I think a good one.
Update: a short follow-up post, on the potential difficulties of implementing this idea.
The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien - Twitter Tracker (06/02/09)
Loved this bit from Tuesday night.
Twitter and Copyright—“Twitterlogical: The Misunderstanding of Ownership”, by Brock Shinen, Esq.
My amateur curiosity says that someone could/will probably write a book or epic poem using individual Twitter posts for each line, and that overall work would be copywriteable, but it seems that any individual tweet isn’t.
I linked to a method for doing this yesterday, and wanted to share my experience with it so far. If you have friends on Facebook who regularly update their status messages on that service, and you’re a Twitter user, it’s possible to get those updates out of Facebook and into Twitter using Twitterfeed. The big question of course, is why, and it’s a bit hard to answer, as every news article about Twitter has tried. Basically what you discover is that it’s just fun to get a stream of updates on what your friends are up to. None of them are typically anything ground-breaking, but when your friends are spread all over the world, it’s cool to hear the mundane updates. (One thing about Twitter: it’s designed around SMS, but you can easily turn that off and just get the updates via chat, by going to the webpage, or via RSS. Depending on how often your friends post, getting all their updates via text message can get expensive.)
Twitter does its thing very well, but lots of people use Facebook, which has a similar feature. The instructions I linked to before left out a few settings, so here how to get your friends’ Facebook updates out of Facebook and into Twitter:
That’s it. Once an hour Twitterfeed will check your Facebook friends’ status updates and post any new ones to your dummy Twitter account.
A similar method can also be used to publish your own Facebook status updates to Twitter, but I haven’t messed with that. The concept of Twitter is inane enough as it is to deal with two different services that do the same thing. I’d certainly set it up if it went the other way, from Twitter to Facebook, but for now I’ll stick with the Twitter application in Facebook.
Here’s a method for funneling your Facebook status updates to your Twitter account. I’d prefer it to go the other way, but it’s useful nonetheless. Not sure if I’ll get around to setting it up. You can also direct your friends’ status updates to Twitter.
Connect your Xbox 360 Gamertag to Twitter | Duncan Mackenzie .Net
Very clever. Checks your XBOX status and updates Twitter when you’re playing a game.
“Maybe that’s when you know how you’ve got a winner: when people use it like mad but can’t fully explain the appeal of it to others.”
Nifty little Mac OS app. Saw it ages ago but I only just got around to setting it up to play around with it.