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."
3rd parties could have seen that coming (Score:2)
Stop building your whole business plan around a new and rapidly evolving non-standard more-or-less closed communication platform controlled by a single entity.
And I highly doubt 3rd party applications will go away, just various extra services those 3rd parties provide (and often charge for) will get less value.
But so far Twitter has no replacement for my TwitDroid and Twirssi clients. And I highly doubt they will ever create an official twitter client for irssi.
Re: (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 Twitt
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I assume that sentence means something to you, but it sure as hell doesn't to me.
Twitter : K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid) (Score:2)
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.
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Actually, I prefer buying a mattress over tweeting. Am I not people?
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This is why we need IPv6—why should I have to fill a database with rows about burnt bread if my toaster can twat it for me?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As much as I like shrooms myself, I think you should abstain for a while.
hi (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
I can't believe what I just did. I clicked on a spam link. On Slashdot. And it was even helpful! My back is relaxing already. Better than Twitter. Better than buying a mattress. Please mod parent up for being Off-Topic Informative.
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.
Noone uses twitter eh? (Score:3, Informative)
Ok.. Jeff Foust [twitter.com] is a great guy to follow if you're into spaceflight. He goes to all the conferences.. reports what he hears. He also makes up the hash tags and most people follow his lead. Hash tags seem to work but they're primitive and they take up valuable characters. Twitter doesn't seem to know how to separate metadata from message. The list functionality they've added recently is interesting. Being able to save searches is also interesting. As for third party clients... yeah, the website is superior, imho.
Seriously... (Score:2)
Yeah nice one, how about adding a couple of hunderd more characters to your messages? 140 characters was fine when SMS messaging was big in 1998!
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i know! (Score:2)
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Why say more when that is all there is to say? And contrary to twitter, this isn't just for reading, but also for replying, as you aptfully demonstrated. Oh yeah, I know twitter allows replies too, in a twisted, convoluted way that forces you to stay glued to it to know what the snippets mean in context... thanks, but no thanks. We have forums for the talking, RSS and email for the instant updates. What does twitter offer on top of that? Why so defensive, passive-aggressive, and implying a point* which you
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flame? yeah.. but trolling?! o_O is that the shitty, cowardly way of saying "he's right and it hurts - so let's bury it"?