Twitter Gets a Tweak 57
crimeandpunishment writes "Twitter is going multimedia. The text-messaging site has a new look with a new push. There's a new pane, making it easier for users to check out photos and videos (and in doing so, come back to the site more frequently and stay there longer, which of course means more advertising revenue). Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says, 'We are still figuring out all the new possibilities.' The new look is expected to roll out around the world over the next few days."
Oh, thank you. (Score:3, Informative)
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They're probably snowed under reading all the comments from fucking morons who think posting the same "tweet" 400+ times will make them fix the issue faster.
heh (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll tweak your twit!
But seriously though...I use Twitter primarily to follow people (game developers, musicians, etc), and many of these updates make that even easier to do. Overall, pretty happy with what's been done.
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yep
it was one thing when there was only twitpic, but now with so many picture and video and other add on services the mobile clients can't keep up and you have to open media in a browser instead of within the tweet
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Indeed - I use twitter to follow photographers, and anything that makes external images and media easier to view is a Good Thing.
Re:heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Twitter rather than RSS? I user a news reader to follow people but I can definitely see the trend is to using Twitter rather than RSS for announcing updates. Since Twitter is closed and RSS is open, this is a little disturbing to me.
Re:heh (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm guessing it's because it's easier for people. To set up an RSS feed, you generally need to set up a site and set up the feed. Then you need to figure out a way to update that feed, and find software that you want to use to follow other people's feeds.
Twitter has set up the site and the feed for you. You can get specially built software for your phone to update/follow those feeds, or else you can do it through SMS. And if you want to find other people's feeds, there's a single site you can go to.
Not that I'm defending Twitter. I don't like Twitter or Facebook or any of those social networking sites, and I think it should all be done with open protocols and open software so you can set up your own sites and configure your own privacy settings. I think most people still wouldn't bother to set up their own site, and would still want some kind of searchable index of people to follow.
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Same here. I mainly follow about 30 or 40 sports writers and bloggers who use twitter to fire off quick hits of info and comments. I'm not interested in anyone following me and my only tweets are usually in reply to those I'm following about something they have tweeted.
As to the question below about setting up an RSS feed, I don't know. It never crossed my mind and truthfully, twitter does all I need, which is really very little.
Limits... (Score:5, Funny)
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Apparently, a picture is no longer worth a thousand words, but only 140 characters.
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Apparently, a picture is no longer worth a thousand words, but only 140 characters.
I honestly do not understand what it is about this post that's 'informative'. It does an ok job of sounding like something profound, I suppose.
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Of course the pictures are limited to 140x140 pixels, and the videos are limited to 140 frames, but, other than that; its an outstanding service!
I hear they're also renaming the site TwitBook.
Yay marketers! (Score:2)
Seriously, it was worthless before, now it's more so, except for the marketers and the twits who 'follow' them and think they're all smart and cool for using twitter.
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i think you're dumb and lame for using slashdot.
slashdot = stagnated
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No one says you have to follow marketers. I've got a core group of friends who are fans of a particular singer and their feeds are usually pretty interesting, and I've actually formed some RL friendships from it.
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I think Twitter is talking about inserting ads into the streams of popular users. So, you may not follow a marketer, but if somebody you follow says something about coffee, that tweet could very well be sponsored by Folgers.
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*shrug* Twitter has got to make money.
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People pay Twitter a lot of money for access to the raw firehose. So far, that's where they have been making their money.
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Reliability? (Score:1, Redundant)
Oh, pretty pictures, how nice! Now how about you don't failwhale every fucking 20 minutes and you always let me tweet, you unstable piece of fei-yu?
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I'm still getting a dead input-box more often than not on twitter.com, and I'm still not hearing anything about improving reliability in this talk of upgrade to more multimedia.
And upgrades to more media never meant more reliability, quite the contrary.
This is cause for concern.
Facebook vs. Twitter (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to be honest here, I've used both twitter and facebook. When twitter first launched, my first reaction was "how is this any different than a facebook status?" The sad part is, there still isn't really an answer to that that doesn't start rambling on.
Really, with this update it seems that twitter is converging to a full social network-ish type site, and facebook is already incorporating changes to be more like twitter. Google is trying for both sides (buzz and me). I'm starting to get confused...
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how is this any different than a facebook status?
The answer from a semantic standpoint - nothing. The real answer is - Twitter is public by default, while Facebook is private by default (well...security/privacy concerns aside). This changes how people interact. For example, if I want to interact with developers that would otherwise not be interested in work that I am doing, Twitter provides a potential avenue. I can also specifically choose to follow only those people or organizations who I care to learn more about.
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Facebook used to be private by default, but I don't think that's the case any more.
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It's pretty public, by default. Check out how many random people's statuses you can comment on:
http://youropenbook.org/ [youropenbook.org]
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my first reaction was "how is this any different than a facebook status?"
Facebook allows you 500 characters for status updates, allowing you to at least form a coherent sentence ?
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Re:Facebook vs. Twitter (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the short difference is that friend relationships on Facebook are symmetric but on Twitter they're asymmetric. Just this minor difference changes the usage dynamic. People can be interested in my updates without my being forced to see their updates.
I'm confused (Score:2)
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitter probably looked at all the 3rd party sites like TwitPic, Twitvid, etc and saw there was a demand.
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Yeah, integrating those features in the site seems better than people linking to sites that Twitter pretends doesn't exist [kinda]
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I guess the idea is that people were using the incredibly short messages to link to other content anyway, so they're just making that linked content available without leaving twitter.
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twitter was originally designed for kids and serial texters to have a web based view of messages. the fact that it's replacing some forums and google for some things wasn't even dreamed about when the company started up
Twitter Overload (Score:2)
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I also have way too fast of a timeline.
So sometimes I just check the page for a particular feed. That, or just looking at my at replies.
I also have all of the feeds I'm following grouped into lists; choosing a particular list to look at is an intermediate between looking at my entire timeline and looking at one feed.
MySpace (Score:2)
Okay... (Score:2)
Won't rail about the changes just to rail about the changes.
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