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:3, Interesting)
I consider it an improvement. Instead of not reading a 10 paragraph blog, I can now not read a 140-character snark.
But seriously, I think twitter has ruined the web. Not twitter itself, but other people's integration with twitter. Used to be, you had a blog or news story or something, people would comment on it. 99.99% of the time, I won't ever see the blog and won't give a a shit. But let's say I do and I do. Instead of some potentially interesting comments, I see "@zyx retweeted this". Or "xyz liked this". Or "zyz pingback".
And even in forums that support threading, you'll see this gay @shit, #suckmydick, etc. It's worse than posting bbcode on slashdot.
Re:Hurt their own developers (Score:4, Interesting)
> will not put up with unstable service for long.
Here's where you are very wrong. Twitters service failures are legendary and persist to this day. And they are still around, bigger than ever.
Just to give you a sense of how long people have put up with them: I "quit" Twitter in July of 2008 because of aggravation with their service failures which was already a running joke *THEN*. I thought for sure no way people would put up with that amount of downtime and unreliability.
Re:Twitter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Follow people who have interesting things to say. Share interesting stuff you find.