Lazy staff and no innovation at Twitter
tech.milancermak.com
tech.milancermak.com
Twitter doesn't need to add lots of largely unnecessary features (or "innovation") to their site. What it needs, and what their team is presumably working on, is focusing on ensuring that their core functionality works correctly and keeping the whole site up and running during their explosive growth.
The fact they're willing to rely on leveraging 3rd parties and providing the core tools to let users innovate should be considered a good thing and other companies should model themselves on Twitter's openness and willingness for co-operation.
And who is the author to call the staff "lazy" because they aren't focusing on what he wants or because he doesn't directly see what they're doing?
"We built an API. 2000 pieces of software are capable of sending updates. Summize was the most important one" @ev #TED
Another thing to consider is that with a site of this site and activity level, any minor change has to be mulled over quite a bit before implementing. There's question of whether or not people will accept it and of how it will be implemented at scale. You can't always take the Facebook approach and upheave your entire website every few months.
And complaining about searching not being on the home page? 2 seconds in Google gets you: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/testing-more-integrated-sear...
Making more realistic but less provable assumptions, I would assume that Twitdom doesn't know about all the apps - let's say they know about 50% of them. And I would imagine that at least 80% of these apps have come out in the last two years rather than in Twitter's first year. That would mean about 800 apps in 700 days - so just over 1 app a day.
Which is about 10 apps a week. Good guess.
Even (especially!) if their protocol is standardized they will benefit. They own the data and can publish it. There wasn't much AIM could do with private conversations without making people angry.
Seems completely irrelevant. Twitter, friendfeed, facebook, and many more provide the exact same features. That's what makes something generic.
Well, actually I see one way it could lose the network effect battle - if it loses in the Twitter vs Facebook battle that's looming. Which is why it's so right that Twitter is pouring all its resources into expansion, rather than worrying about monetisation. Once they have a definite, secure monopoly on status broadcast messages, then they can think of the next step. Before that, everything must be geared towards building that monopoly.
Friendster is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it...oh wait, MySpace ate them for lunch.
MySpace is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it...oh wait, FaceBook ae them for lunch.
FaceBook is a pile of crap and easily copied, and yet it...oh wait, Twitter's eating them for lunch. ;-)
Network effects tend to be strongest when they connect people who have never interacted before and would not interact without the service. For example, E-bay buyers and sellers don't have prior existing relationships - they need E-bay to find each other. If you're a buyer, you go where all the sellers are, and if you're a seller, you go where all the buyers are, and you can't communicate with a whole mass of buyers at once to say "Let's go somewhere else." Same with Microsoft: developers go where customers are, customers go where developers are, and neither know who or where the others are until they put out a product on Microsoft's platform.
The problem for social networking sites is that they've largely just codified existing social networks, which all have plenty of backchannels to use instead. So if something clearly better comes along, they send a mass message to all their friends (or just talk about it in school - remember that the public school system is a far bigger social network than anything online) saying "Hey, I found this great website, everybody go check it out."
I've got a bunch of friends I met online through the Harry Potter fandom. When I met them, everybody was like "Are you on AIM? How about LiveJournal? Here, let me get you an invite code." Then in 2005, when FaceBook came out, there was a flurry of friends-locked posts saying, "Are you on FaceBook? I'm Full Name @ College" if they were in college, or "Are you on MySpace? I'm ScreenName there" if they were not. Now, my friends list looks like, "Anybody on Twitter? Send me your screen names so I can follow you!" followed by a bunch of "Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter..." messages.
I've never met 90% of the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter, so I don't think that theory affects Twitter.
What monopoly? Facebook has more people posting status updates and more sources of revenue...
Ultimately people use the AIM network and AOL receives no net value. They can use any client and the data is private. Additionally they can migrate between clients because their network is a part of the protocol.
That the messages are public is completely relevant. As long as the twitter network is used, twitter can create value from the data. Twitter search only grows in value when more people are on their network.
This is why the comparison between AIM and Twitter is flawed.
1) He claims that there are all these features they could have just dropped in. But none of the features the author describes seem like hit-me-over-the-head obvious features. I can live without "...tab-completion, threaded conversations, better URL shortening, marking of new tweets since last visit, in-line pictures, @replies from people one is not following in the main stream or groups yet..."
2) He states: "...one would think they’ll focus on enhancing the experience of using and developing Twitter apps, which in this case it means implementing OAuth. Yeaaah…wrong. OAuth has been made available just recently (before that, only selected developers could try OAuth) and is still in beta."
But I wonder if the author has ever tried to implement a working, scalable OAuth system. It's a major pain in the ass and by no means a panacea. HTTPS + HTTP Auth is much more straightforward. I don't even think I would call Google or Flickr's OAuth systems perfect yet. They still have huge usability gaps that the end user has to get over (redirect to log in), let alone the technical issues that are likely lurking behind the scenes.
Overall it seems like the author is focused too much on the idea of features for features sake and not whether Twitter has found a niche and done well limiting their service to meet the needs of that niche.
Ever hear of facebook? Friendfeed?
Nobody does exactly what Twitter does and does it well, or even in an interesting way. Twitter serves a unique niche.
Calling Twitter a unique niche, that's pretty lame. What they do, technically, is simple and could be repeated without much effort by pretty much anyone. They win, I think, because of branding ('twitter' and 'tweet' just seem destined for the lexicon) and because of the status they have among the technorati that's translating into mainstream adoption.
Jaiku is too complex. Brightkite is too complex.
Sometimes not having extra features is a web site's primary feature.
I don't know. That's the problem with trying to compete with Twitter: it can't be done. Anything you add messes up the design.
I wasn't complaining: I just don't think there are any Twitter competitors. Twitter does something so simply it can't be competed against effectively. FriendFeed can be improved, both feature-wise and design-wise. Twitter can't.
In a way, I hope Twitter stays the same for as long as possible. Tumblr used to be ultrasimple in that same compact way. Now they've added a ton of features I really dislike, and I'm strongly considering switching to something else if I can find anything decent. Twitter will lose focus if it does anything else. (As it is, things like that new recommended people list is pretty garish.) That makes monetization tricky, though.
If you're arguing that Twitter is winning, fine, I agree, but it's just flat-out wrong to say that nobody's trying to take a cut of their users.
There's no such thing as a "cut" of users between non-competing sites. You can use FriendFeed and Twitter together and there's a good reason for it. There's less of a reason to use, say, Twitter alongside Jaiku. Suddenly you're using two services to do the same thing.
Same with Twitter and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, or Twitter and nearly any successful company.
A real Twitter competitor would be a "this-or-that" competitor. Facebook-or-MySpace. Flickr-or-SmugMug. Youtube-or-Vimeo. Twitter has no competitor that's worth mentioning. The second-biggest competitor was Jaiku, and it was mediocre.
You do realize that the ability to use both at once is FF's strategy for competing with Twitter, don't you? They know Twitter has a massive user advantage, so rather than try to build a competing network from scratch, they're trying to get users to use both, and hope that the extra features eventually convince users to be at FF more often than Twitter.
And FB: they have about a billion more users than Twitter, but their recent redesign shows that they certainly think of Twitter as a competitor. "Closed" vs. "open" isn't a point of competition? You don't think to yourself "I'm going to take the next 30 seconds to tell people about what I'm up to, do I use FB or Twitter?"?
And FB: they have about a billion more users than Twitter, but their recent redesign shows that they certainly think of Twitter as a competitor.
No it doesn't. Facebook's been moving in this direction ever since they introduced the status update. Perhaps Twitter inspired their changes - and it almost certainly did - but Facebook isn't trying to take Twitter users away. Why would they both competing with Twitter? It's miniscule. It's where Facebook was three years ago. Facebook has its own niche.
"Closed" vs. "open" isn't a point of competition? You don't think to yourself "I'm going to take the next 30 seconds to tell people about what I'm up to, do I use FB or Twitter?"?
Of course I do. I act differently around friends than I do around complete strangers.
That's just flat-out wrong, you can post short messages directly in FF just like with Twitter. If Twitter closes its doors, FF is probably in the best position right now to be its drop-in replacement.
but Facebook isn't trying to take Twitter users away.
No, they're trying to keep the users they already have. You don't think competition includes keeping an eye on the up-and-comers and trying to keep your advantage?
I'm pretty sure this back-and-forth is getting pointless, I'm done.
You seem to be of the opinion that Twitter's purpose is to "post short messages". I doubt that's why people use Twitter. FriendFeed's message is no solution.
No, they're trying to keep the users they already have. You don't think competition includes keeping an eye on the up-and-comers and trying to keep your advantage?
I don't. Facebook isn't basing their strategy around Twitter. They're basing it around their own set of features, which do something entirely different. As I said: perhaps Twitter inspired their new system, but Facebook's not stupid enough to think they're a Twitter alternative, and it's not stupid to think it should be.
You seem to be of the opinion that Twitter's purpose is to "post short messages".
Um, yes. Because it is. And yes, that's why people use Twitter, along with the fact that a bunch of other people use Twitter (which would go away if they shut their doors, wouldn't it? So that bit's kind of irrelevant in the context of this imaginary scenario).
Also: You agree with this, go back to the part of this thread where you said "Twitter provides a very simple way to pass along messages."
Now I'm done, for realz.
It's also a great way to ensure minimal leverage to make money. At least they saw the good sense to buy summize.
Twitter is as close as my phone. It removes most of the barriers to publishing, and the limitations help to make it predictable.
Could twitter's functionality be replicated; yes. However none of the fast followers seem to be able to stick with the simple feature set.