Twitter Moves To Curb Instagram Links 114
Hammeh writes According to a report on Mashable, Twitter have sent out messages to some of their high profile users prompting them to share images using Twitter's own service rather than Instagram links. The news comes 2 years since Instagram pulled support for Twitter cards and has been part of the continuing battle between the two social networks. With Instagram now having overtaken Twitter in terms of users, this may be a move to try and use high profile users to show off Twitter's own image and content tools.
Never forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
Never forget: You are the product, not the customer.
Re:Disintegration of the ecosystem (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hey, let's select a group of our most influential users and then annoy them with an unexpected and minimally useful nag screen when they try to use our service!" is a plan that sounds like a joke, not a strategy; but apparently twitter is now doing exactly that. Are they really gambling that all those users are just morons who are too stupid to realize that twitter has a given set of features; but would totally love to embrace them over a competitor they already use if only they are nagged enough? That seems...a trifle optimistic.
Re: (Score:1)
This.
Regarding the march of social media and search engines, it is the prime mover that explains everything.
Serious question (Score:1)
How many people here actually use Twitter?
I created an account years ago, never posted anything, and I don't read anything off of twitter... I'm 26.
I in never post on ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I never post anywhere. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Slashd ... oh crap.
Seriously though, I don't have a Twitter account. I looked at Twitter once or twice and I found it lacking either of two things that would make it useful. I might find it useful if I could either find stuff by topic or through a social NETWORK, but it doesn't seem to be made for searching or exploring, only for following a specific celebrity you've already chosen. I might be interested in feeds about a certain topic. Twitter doesn't do that. I might be interested in seeing what old friends are up to, finding all the people I went to high school with like Facebook. Maybe when I look up what my friend is doing I would click to see whatever happened to his hot sister.
Twitter may have changed since I last looked at it, or those functions might have been there, but not just intuitive how to do those things.
Re: (Score:1)
Twitter definitely supports search. I've gotten noticed for tweets mentioning Cryptonomicon, Vonnegut, the Voyager Golden record...one of those has led to something resembling a friendship.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I use Twitter instead of SMS for alert messages,.This was because I had *three jobs in a row* where the chief architect and me, as a new lead systems guy, got more than 300 alerts per day for which the architects always said "just pay attention to the important ones", and refused to define what was "important". Then they'd flip out when I didn't respond to the "critical" alerts within 15 minutes, because Verizon insisted on waiting up to an hour to send all the messages as a flood, rather than when they wer
Re: (Score:1)
That's not verizon's fault. That's fundamentally how SMS works.
SMS at the protoco8%l level is best effort, and delivery is not guaranteed or cancelled for up to 6 days.
If you have a full SS7 gateway, and know the destination of your end-user, you can manually set the routing the message will take, but otherwise, it goes through best effort routing to
a) your physical location as defined by area-code/exchange; then
b) from there, it gets routed to any phon-number-migration if you're not still on the original
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter is useful for rapidly searching for news: accidents, network issues at a local ISP, realtime coverage of press conferences, that sort of thing. Also, many companies and websites have their own Twitter accounts and post news there - something like RSS replacement which is realtime and quick to browse (because messages are limited).
Re: (Score:2)
How many people here actually use Twitter?
I created an account years ago, never posted anything, and I don't read anything off of twitter... I'm 26.
I'm 51 and created (parked) an account in 2012 and have one tweet posted from April 2014 -- after they changed the site style/layout and started nagging people with a sample "first tweet" for those w/o any tweets. It says: "Shut up Twitter; I'll tweet when I want to."
Sometimes, I post a tweet or two, but usually delete them after a while once any current relevance passes. Ya, that's not how you're suppose to use it, but so what. If you're not promoting something and/or yourself, Twitter is just a pointl
Re: (Score:2)
I'm @PinoBatch [twitter.com].
But this list [slashdot.org] mentions Erris, Mactrope*, gnutoo, inTheLoo, willeyhill*, westbake*, Odder*, ibane, DeadZero, freenix, myCopyWrong, right handed, GNUChop, trimmer, and wiiiyhiii*. Or, rather, Twitter uses them. All of them [slashdot.org]. And this Twitter can post more than 140 characters [slashdot.org].
* These are typosquatted versions of other Slashdot users' usernames.
Re: (Score:2)
Social Networking is a mess (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a similar situation to the early days of searching. People didn't go to early Yahoo.com to get the things Yahoo wanted to push, people went to search the internet and tolerated having things pushed at them as long as the search was good enough. But as soon as Google offered a good search with minimal advertising the market spoke very loudly about that kind of thing. I feel like there's a pent-up demand in social networking for low friction, low-bullshit connecting of people. The first social network that offers a superior product and doesn't stand in peoples' way will make a killing.
Re: (Score:3)
How?
Re: (Score:1)
How?
Shotgun blast to the chest?
And *that* would be the first social network worth signing up for: one that doesn't stand in your way, but effectively delivers shotgun blasts to the chest on demand... perhaps via a "dislike" button?
Re:Social Networking is a mess (Score:4, Insightful)
When old Yahoo made money from its search engine it did so by pushing paid sites as search results, cluttering up the interface with advertisements, and otherwise being intrusive and unpleasant. And it lacked the self-awareness to change this behavior. Rather than saying, "How can we make things better for the user?" they said, "How can we make more money from the user?" So while better search results was on their radar an interface like Google's just never came up as a possibility. That's why they were blown completely out of the water. Google made money as a search provider without using Yahoo-esque tactics by being the first to do what present social networks are doing (analytics) but more importantly by being a place users wanted to go. Twitter is already doing this successfully. Look at their interface: light, efficient, smooth, and fast. And they're very successful. By limiting user actions now they're eating the seed corn. The'll make more money in the short term but in the long term they're pushing users to less limited places.
But I digress. By "social networking" I meant Facebook-esque networking. Attempts to allow comprehensive social collectives to happen. Facebook has fallen far down the monetization rabbit hole in the same way old Yahoo did. The way Facebook thinks is of where to put ads, how to better manipulate users into sub-optimal decisions (such as mis-click capture), how to make games that will best entangle users
Re: (Score:1)
Oh yeah? well try using slashdot on a 486 running linux 2.2! It's unusable!
Re: (Score:2)
There's a problem with your business plan, and that's the paradigm shift from private company to public corporation.
Once social media and search engine companies go IPO, the business model changes and the suits arrive.
While two of the dynamics don't change, in that the user is the product and the client is the advertiser, the ownership shift changes dramatically.
During initial growth, the interest of the user is the primary consideration as companies work to gain critical mass.
After the IPO, shareholder sho
Re: (Score:1)
But that's cool, just go on blaming web developers and technolo
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have to imagine that. Every time I turn no script off, I almost always hit a site like that and the images constantly move the formatting and content to fit the im
Re: (Score:2)
It's not even that hard to do, but most devs do
Re: (Score:2)
...Why? Width and height of an image are functions of its content and have nothing to do with style. What do you gain by specifying them separately from the IMG tag itself, apart from more complexity (and probably slower page loads due to the need to download and parse more CSS)?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
the page does not move. alone is 0x0, then the image starts loading and the page is re-rendered, your currently focused point moves to make place for the loading image. Best if the image height is unknown until its loaded completely.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Where "well-written javascript" means popping the images in while I'm reading, and not fucking waiting until I'm trying to scroll down to read more.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Where I work I think the bandwidth is fine but the latency is horrendous, with every individual connection having to be checked against an extensive list of unapproved sites. So on-demand loading is an irritant/causes jerky scroll motion, even when content rearrangement is not invovled.
Re: (Score:2)
I can totally see other de
Re: (Score:2)
Especially static content, and especially when the content of the article is a series of sentences punctuated by big squares that, rather than loading images, contain t.co redirects to the images that some doofus tweeted.
And this is where your understanding of the problem fails.
Again, this is a middle-management and bean counter problem, not a developer problem. The developers don't sit there and ask "How can we add more Twitter to our pages?" On the contrary, the bean counters say "We can save on bandwidth by letting Twitter and Instagram host our images, while at the same time monetizing our users through forced interaction" and the managers relay that as "Give us the ability to easily link to Twitter and Instagram imag
Re: (Score:2)
> Actually, genius, "Javashit", as you call it, when used properly, is leaps and bounds better than iFrames
Neither of which is better than actually keeping the content in clean plain text format. Excess eye candy damages performance and risks security on both ends of a web connection, and also makes the content less accessible to older hardware and to people with visual difficulty or limited mobility. I'm afraid that I _do_ blame web developers, because their excess reliance on eye candy leads to things
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> You seriously think the developers decided any of that?
Yes, they often do. Software developers often have to "sell" their projects at planning meetings. They can choose, and do, which features to emphasize.
> Also, there is nothing inherent in the use of javascript that affects security in any way; a site using multiple
It's complexity, and frequent use to cause the client to do anything other than a simple "pull" of content, create profound vulnerabilities.
> But you're wrong in cases where it is d
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page;
Or I can just imagine having the patience to wait a whopping 5 seconds for the whole page to render?
Re: (Score:2)
47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.
Since when is giving people what they want a bad thing?
Offline reading (Score:2)
Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page; then, well-written javascript popping the images in as you read. The content loads and renders faster and you have an over-all better experience, especialy if you happen to be on a mobile device or slow connection.
I have the opposite experience. Because my mobile device has no cellular Internet connection, I often load pages over Wi-Fi at home and then read them while riding public transit. If a page uses this "lazy loading" technique, none of the images will load when I get around to reading them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean you don't check to make sure there wasn't a server issue or some other issue preventing the content from loading before you drop off of the network?
Usually I look at the first screenful of a document to see it is overwhelmingly more likely than not to have loaded. For most sites that don't use lazy loading, viewing the favicon and snippet of the <title> element in the browser's tab bar is enough. Or are you claiming that I ought to read the entire document before I read the document?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I understand what you're talking about. But on the sites I read daily, lazy loading happens at least an order of magnitude more often than interrupted HTTP connections. And scrolling to the end is problematic for two reasons. First, because placeholders are zero height, the page reflows after each image loads. And second, if I scroll too far, the comment widget loads on each page, which causes the machine to spend Internet bandwidth on downloading, and CPU time on laying out, comments from other readers rat
Re: (Score:2)
And second, if I scroll too far, the comment widget loads on each page, which causes the machine to spend Internet bandwidth on downloading, and CPU time on laying out, comments from other readers rather than downloading and laying out other articles.
So, wait... you like lazy loading, then?
Re: (Score:2)
On this particular site, I would prefer the images to load when I load the page and the comments to load when I follow the "View Comments" link. So I spent some time writing an RSS reader that implements this behavior, transforming the attribute that the lazy loading engine uses into the src= attribute and dropping elements outside the main article. But I'm an edge case; most people won't have the expertise for that option.
Re: (Score:2)
That said, I do wonder what some of these implementations do when a user tries to print the page. Does the print view also lazy load, or does it load all of the content because, well, you know, it can't pop it on the printed page when you go to view it; it has to be there for printing.
In short, I guess I'm asking if you've ever tried the print vie
Also too lazy to add a print option (Score:2)
The vast majority of users of any given site have connectivity while they're using the site.
Because most users think they need to be online just to read web documents, certain cellular companies in the US are raking in beaucoup bucks. Time is money, but I'd rather spend four hours of my time once and then not have to spend it again the rest of the year rather than waste $400 a year on a data plan.
I guess I'm asking if you've ever tried the print view
I never tried looking for it. I just tried five minutes ago, but it turns out that a randomly chosen article from Cracked.com doesn't appear to contain the word "print" at all. I guess what my homemade re
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But as soon as Google offered a good search with minimal advertising the market spoke very loudly about that kind of thing.
Google wasn't the first search engine with a minimalist site design; Altavista started that, and I think you're right about it being an important driver for their success. This was in the days of dial-up, and the difference between loading the Yahoo page and the Altavista one was quite a few seconds.
The model for today's social networks appear to be to deliberately start with low-friction, low-bullshit, come-in-we're-open policies (sometimes after a beta-for-the-leet-only period), become popular, then c
Re: (Score:2)
The model for today's social networks appear to be to deliberately start with low-friction, low-bullshit, come-in-we're-open policies (sometimes after a beta-for-the-leet-only period), become popular, then cash in and pile on the restrictions, rules, ads and dataraping.
A lot of this is because at a certain point the realize / understand that the vulture capitalists who invested the bizziolns of cash for the cool office space and retro pinball machines want a return on their investment. The other part is that many or even most of these start-ups have from the word "go" operated under the plan of developing a product and than offloading it to Facebook for a billion or two. It's all about the money, and you can't make money without "monetizing" the product.
the problem with Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the problem with Twitter (Score:5, Interesting)
+1 to this.
I appreciate the terseness of Twitter's 140char limit, but it's a little *too* restrictive. I agree it makes people creative, but after a while the shine goes off that when you're just trying to get something important out there which could be better said with a few more characters rather than making people jump via a URL to somewhere else.
Maybe they should just abolish the limit entirely. Not like we're confined to the restrictions of SMS as the data carrier any more.
Re: (Score:3)
140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance.
With you so far.
If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter.
And now you lost me. Twitter isn't for "anything of substance". It's either insubstantial stuff, or links to substantial stuff. People don't use it as, or want it to be, a place for "anything of substance". Leave that to the blogs.
Re: (Score:2)
TL;DR
Twitter is not about a thesis on your life. It's about a quick thought.
Re:the problem with Twitter (Score:5, Interesting)
140 characters isn't enough ... in English. You should see the novels that Japanese people post on Twitter. Japanese is about 2x denser per character than English, so you can fit in a lot more stuff. I was amazed when I was able to compose an elaborate explanation for someone in Japanese and it still fit in one tweet (I'm learning the language).
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter measures tweets in characters, not in bytes. Japanese is not 2x denser than English in bytes, but it's 2x denser than English in characters, and that's what Twitter cares about.
Try writing a few tweets (or tweet-sized snippets) in English and in Japanese sometime, see for yourself.
Re: (Score:1)
Then the obvious hack is to hijack 26*26 unicodes to store pairs of English letters, and tweet a link to a special font that people can install to see these pairs of letters.
Re: (Score:1)
Twitter lets you post 140 32bit ints.
Thus, you get pretty much 140 Unicode CodePoints. So 140 latin characters, 140 CJK Characters, 140 codepoints.
Japanese is very dense, and much okurigana is optional (and generally is not used exept when it's not clear from context which of two valid readings should be used), and if you really want, many bits of grammatical kana can be written using Kanji as well, which everyone does learn in high-school. It's generally not common in general writing, but used often in
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know, 140 seems like a lot to me when you consider hobbies like six word stories [sixwordstories.net]. (not trying to plug the site, it was just the first one that came up in a search, there are a few others that do various numbers of word "stories").
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Even removing all the people it's a reply to and the image or url links would had helped a lot.
At least when it become used for discussion rather than just saying something short.
Guess birds don't discuss.
Most useless service of the popular ones.
SMS always sucked too btw.
Re: (Score:2)
An example of why the limit is useful. You might have said it in 140 characters but you wasted my time. Learn to use language effectively. [138 chars]
Re: (Score:3)
Actually that took you 150 chars, considering your character count was part of your point. Better luck next time. [127 chars]
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, however, I got bored and wanted to find out how much potential storage twitter posts use on a daily basis.
500Million Tweets a day : http://www.internetlivestats.c... [internetlivestats.com]
* 140 bytes = 70Billion Bytes, or, 70Gigabytes roughly a day
If you double the char array to 280, thats only 140Gigabytes a day for just tweets.
Twitter have the money and network infrastructure to do this without question. I think its more a case that Twitter believes the 140 character limit is part of their "ethos", changing it would pi
Re: (Score:2)
One of the beauties about 140 characters is you have to think about what you want to say and how you say it. Editing for brevity often makes it punchier and better phrased. Many are the occasion when I have written a joke or insight for facebook, modified it for twitter, and then posted the twitter version in both cases because the twitter version was just better.
300 characters is not almost as quick to read it is quite clearly twice as long to read. For me, that would mean that instead of having time to
Re: (Score:3)
140 chars is enough for a pithy soundbyte. Those pay better than analysis. Blog if you want to write a manifesto.
Re: (Score:2)
Tumblr (Score:2)
If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter.
You mean like Tumblr or Blogspot or LiveJournal or just about any other blogging platform?
superior services will demolish their business if they don't listen to the number one complaint about Twitter from their users
I thought the biggest complaint about Twitter was sockpuppetry [slashdot.org]. See Twitter use thirteen different characters [slashdot.org].
decentralized tools (Score:1)
I personally boycott centralized tools/services as much as I can. It's like eating junk food- or maybe even poison. You won't catch me on facebook, twitter, instagram, skype, or gmail. There are better options for which you don't have to sacrifice your freedoms and liberties. I use roundcube on a virtual private server for instance and xmpp for messaging. I also use golblin for youtube/facebook like replacement. And saying nobody is one these systems is just being lazy. Of course nobody is on them if you do
Re: (Score:2)
and saving them is not that nice, too. clicking just closes the lightbox
Impressive... (Score:5, Funny)
Perspective (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Zuckerberg owns Instagram (well, Facebook owns Instagram), so Zuckerberg isn't exactly on the sidelines for this thing.
No use (Score:2)
It's dead, Jim!
As an active user of both... (Score:3)
Twitter's request is asinine. Twitter is only set up to share with other Twitter users. When I post something to Instagram, I get to share with people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I do occasionally use VSCO and send things to each service individually (usually when I want to preserve the aspect ratio of an image; the lower res square that Instagram demands doesn't always work best).
If Twitter wants people to use their service for images, they have to make it easier to share outside of their network. People interested in sharing usually want to cover all their bases, not just one population.
But this is what's wrong with Twitter's current managementâ"they don't understand their own service and the people that use it. And they don't seem to get that if you want to grow, you have to reach outside of the network and bring people in, not broadcast to the people that are already there. I have friends that have joined Twitter because of my own active cross-posting (using third party tools)â"if Twitter made that part easier, maybe they could convince people to give them a shot. (That and doubling back and making third party clients easier to develop again; the official app is trash compared to Tweetbot. If they want ads, just make it part of the stream that the clients can't skip. It's not so hard.)