DISQUS

Alex Hillman Writes Here: webapps as social experiments - obvious case study 1: twitter.com

  • Nate Westheimer · 1 year ago

    Alex, good response. I'm realizing that my post was more a rant about what's been built on top of the service. I realize that the beauty is the the simplicity -- Kyle articulates this well in his post -- but I have been thoroughly unimpressed with the services built on top of Twitter. Is a Technorati and Techmeme clone the best we can get? [hashtags and twittermeme, respectively.] The other day, the Freebase community manager sent out an email on the list asking, "Who's stuck?" I took that to mean, why aren't you people making cooler stuff with our API, and how can we help from our end. I'm not on Twitter's email list like you are, but I imagine they need to be kicking more developers in the ass to make cool shit. I see the big vision for Twitter, I just don't see it being played out anywhere. All of your examples of how you use Twitter and the same as mine -- breaking news, lifestreaming, and serendipity instigation -- but they haven't changed one bit in the last year. That's how we used Twitter a year ago. If this platform was as promising as we want to believe, I think there would be more built on top of the promise.


    My 2 cents.

  • Alex Hillman · 1 year ago

    Nate, you're dead on with your point. I wonder what kinds of things Twitter could be doing to encourage innovation with their API? I've heard of wild ideas like using twitter accounts as data tokens for passing things back and forth between two remote apps (think...a flash based multiplayer game that uses twitter to pass coordinates back and forth).


    I think the problem is social, not technical, in the fact that people still haven't totally figured out what twitter is for in the first place. That simultaneous boon and bane of "not knowing", while it could encourage innovation, is tough because more people know about the base functionality, the more they can start to think outside the box. It takes a very special mind to go outside of the box without baseline for inspiration. To our credit, our industry is does have a good number of people like that, but I'd still count the group as a "few", maybe even several, of that type of innovator.


    So is it Twitter's fault? The community's? Was the "if you build it they will come" mentality not enough for the Twitter API?". Those are the questions you've got me thinking about now. Wondering what everyone else thinks.