Twitter To Add Places and User Streams 26
adeelarshad82 writes "Twitter has announced at the Chirp conference that its roadmap will include locations and user streams. Twitter will maintain and curate its own database of locations, such as hotels and restaurants, and make the database open to developers. Moreover, the API for user streams, a technical name for real-time data that will be for desktop apps only, will be available to users within the next few days. Through this API developers will be able to take virtually all Twitter data and make it available to desktop apps in real time. Twitter used its first Chirp conference to assuage the fears of some of its developer base, who are worried about whether they will be left out in the cold following the establishment of an 'official' BlackBerry app and the acquisition of the Tweetie mobile app. Judging from the announcements at Chirp and a recent post which might indicate death to third party services like TweetDeck, it's safe to say that Twitter wants to push developers to start building services that leverage Twitter instead of just filling holes."
Re:3rd parties could have seen that coming (Score:3, Insightful)
They should instead build on a open and standard communications platform that no one uses? Twitter is not a only a communication platform, it's a social platform, and they require a large user base to be profitable to anyone building on them.
And relying on closed platforms has been working great for years. Windows is a closed platform; just like Twitter ran over some clients with its official versions, so did Microsoft ran over Netscape. It doesn't mean that most can't be successful.
By the way, Tircd works on any IRC client, not only on Irssi.
Re:Twitter : K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid) (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to play devil's advocate, I'd say that the difference is that the two examples given never got to the point where they became de facto "standards". I mean, every news site online now has twitter and facebook integration.
The biggest headache online now has got to be registering. As a user, I don't even know how many sites I have a login for, in order to post comments, or use features, etc. Both twitter and facebook have initiatives to become the "universal login". If either of them is successful...providing a service that allows web developers to very easily add registration capability to their sites, and piggyback on the traffic those sites can provide, then the future for twitter and facebook will be very different from myspace and friendster.
I worry that, as they come to be relied on as "services", and fall into the wrong hands, they could make online life suck quite a bit.
MORE data? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good luck with that.
Twitter is already totally overwhelmed. They can't even provide a search interface to tweets that are more than a week old. Google and the Library of Congress should charge Twitter for archiving their data for them.