Why Twitter Should Stay Out of the App Business 76
waderoush writes "Twitter has come out with some impressive new tools this month — the Twitter app for iPhone/iPad on September 1, and the overhauled Twitter website, or #NewTwitter, this week. But Twitter is late to its own party, Xconomy argues today. #NewTwitter still lacks basics like photo uploading and URL shortening, and apps built by third-party developers like TweetDeck and Flipboard continue to provide more compelling ways to explore the information in a Twitter stream. While Twitter may finally be 'getting focused' on ways to achieve mass market growth, as former Twitter platform manager Alex Payne wrote this week, the company will have a hard time competing with its own developer community — and might do better instead to acknowledge, and focus on, the service's growing role as a general Internet utility."
Re:Twitter? (Score:4, Informative)
I actually use it quite a bit. I follow a few, carefully chosen people. Of all the "Web 2.0" stuff, Twitter is the one that stuck. I like the simplicity of it. A short character limit is twisted genius. I don't tweet every day. I'm not following anybody who posts their location all the time or tweets about their grocery shopping.
That said, I understand it's not everybody's cup of tea. I feel the same way about FaceBook that some people feel about Twitter. I tried FB for a while, and it just seems to have a way of making everybody look like a drunken idiot.
It seems like it's possible to find quite a few people on Twitter who tweet appropriately, and tweet interesting things. It hasn't been infected with *ville applications yet.
Re:Twitter? (Score:4, Informative)
I consider twitter to be a helpful engine for serendipitous discovery. Sometimes I want to search for information, sometimes I want information to come to me from interesting people. The first time I tried twitter I didn't get it, but I had the nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. So when I came back to it a few months later, I thought of it as an information stream I could dip into when I felt like discovering something new.
Re:Hurt their own developers (Score:2, Informative)
1) Lady Gaga (attention whore pop star
2) Britney Spears (Ditto
So really the top two are pointless pop icon women. And you acted as if he was so far off base. LoL.
3)Ashton Kutcher (male equivalent of above
4)Obama (Actual important person!
5) Justin Beiber (child version of #3
Saying that twitter is for dumb people mindlessly following pop trash seems to be an accurate depiction in this same. 4/5 of the top 5 are pop stars of some sort. And by pop trash I mean famous people who are more likely to be thought of for their toplessness than their achievements in life.
In the next 5 there are 2 daytime trash tv stars and 3 girls to oogle. The next 5 are twitter itself, 2 guy celebs to oogle, 1 girl and CNN!
Also, noting that you said: "Madonna & Hilton aren't even in the top 25 for followers"... I'm going to assume you noticed that Paris Hilton is the 26th most followed person on twitter? Madonna doesn't have an account so her ranking is hardly fair
If anything, thank you for reaffirming by belief that twitter is a horrible waste of time where brain cells go to die.
Getting focused? (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously ... using the word focused in relation to a website/service that doesn't allow messages long enough to really even complete a thought in writing?
Twitter is entirely about serving people with absolutely no focus what so ever. Seems like 'focusing' would be exactly what they don't want to do.
Of course, I think twitter is about the dumbest service I've ever seen. It was a retard solution to the fact that phones had a no useful email client really because for some odd reason, no one has realized that a proper imap setup is all thats needed to get 'push' messaging. Twitter made sense before everyone that texted had phones that were more than capable of using a real alternative that actually allows to you complete at least one thought in a single message.