Well written. Truth be told. Though I think Twitter is vulnerbale to being the next friendster.
Latest Updates: twitter RSS
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louisgray.com: It’s Twitter’s World: The Second, Parallel, Internet ★
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Lunch’s Twitter List: Recommendations With Rationale – ReadWriteStart ★
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This is good stuff to supplement the Twitter SUL. also not my idea on http://twitter.com/openSUL
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Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans – ReadWriteStart ★
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Nice article. I agree with Greg Boutin.
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I have 3,571 tweets that show that Twitter isn’t for lunch anymore ★
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Technical Specification | TweepML
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RSS, Twitter, People, Power And The Negligent Tech Bloggers
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Further comments in response to this and other recent posts:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/rss-isnt-dead-just-ask-executives.php#comments
Their are a few ways to frame and respond to the tabloid-like headline “RSS is Dead”.
One is to directly compare RSS with Twitter. This is a mistake unless you clearly point out that what you are actually comparing is Reader/Aggregator software, the differences between a centralized and de-centralized messaging/headline/link sharing system and the mechanisms of efficient delivery of this data to subscribers or general content consumers.
The more accurate approach is to compare software that consumes content…. whether that be content from social networks like Twitter or Facebook or from Blogs and Websites or even for media like video and audio (poscasts). RSS is NOT software. Google Reader is. My Twitter stream is NOT software. Tweetie is. Whether a desktop application or a website wrapper… a UI for managing data/content and how efficient that software… which methods it uses…. is the real debate. Push/Streaming and Pull/Polling and App2App Notification protocols are at the heart of the issue.
One of the benefits of a centralized system like twitter is its built-in ability to provide more immediacy to users once new content is posted and available in their stream. The storage, delivery and notification system is cohesive. Obviously, the synaptics of the platform are going to be more coalescent and efficient in data handling. Though the Open Web (which includes search engines like google and bing) will better compete now that an entity like twitter has brought this issue of massive rapid micro-messaging (and link sharing) to the forefront.
You also have an enormous amount of people participating, doing the work of an army of ants…. propagating headlines, links and short messages. Mixed in with that you have your soundbyte culture and truly authentic interesting conversations.
The blogosphere also is involved in this activity with trackbacks/pingbacks/comments/blogrolls/bookmarks and of course the blog posts themselves that can contain several links within the article. In a way, links are the currency of the web. But the difference is the barrier to entry. Even though setting up a blog is easy today, it’s also about the avoiding… the void. joining a built-in community of people, for many, is more fun than being the lone blogger out there on the wild web. So, several blogging services have focused on this to make it more appealing. And their is a bit of momentum returning to blogging. But still, everyday people DO like the AOLesque Facebook and the Twitter phenomena snuck up on everyone as a cultural realization that bursts of messages are useful, easy and fun.
Twitter started out as a mostly mobile-centric app for self-status updates but has evolved into emulating RSS headline and links, albeit the proper headlines are too often replaced with useless comments. Not to mention the link itself is almost always hidden by a short url so you go in blind. That and a total lack of associated metadata… In a way it becomes the Poor Man’s RSS. But it’s faster. You give up some signal, and you get fast noise. If you are well trained, lucky, bored or just OCD about info consumption…. then you can pick out the gems. How often does it truly matter to a normal user if they hear about something before others? It’s a rare situation. And if it’s your business to know the news and monitor the pulse of the internet, then you you likely have a formula that crosses many tools, services and methods to help you achieve an advantage for “breaking stories”. More power to you.
If you were to compare just the data alone, RSS is no worse as it provides headlines and links… and can be better because it also provides rich metadata and even the entire contents of a content item. RSS is data/content. Twitter is data/content bundled with a social wrapper controlled by a single company. It should be getting more clear now why you cannot simply compare the two without more in depth analysis and explanation… We can do without the glossy tabloid style headlines. We have enough of that everywhere else. It would be great if tech can stay clear of such antics and worry less about page views and tech gossip and grow up.
The de-centralized open web syndication can and will keep up with the speed of twitter because the underlying tech does not care whether data is from a twitter stream (which generates RSS itself) or if that data is in a blog or if that data only exists as an RSS document. It DOES NOT MATTER. Most Twitter clients pull in content by polling the twitter API. That is not different than Email or RSS Readers. But its not efficient. So Push Email and Push RSS/Atom and Push anything else is preferred from a technical perspective and exciting from a users perspective. Excitement does not equate to a need. But it’s an advancement, one that was accelerated due to the popularity of Twitter and it’s delivery speed. And advancements in consumer tech are good.
Yes, real-time data is not new. But the notion to have this effect for anyone on the Internet is powerful. But Twitter alone is not the story. Twitter was a spark to shift focus on consumer services that can offer massive rapid content sharing. It’s wrong for Twitter to think that they can always be at the core of this future. They can be part of it… maybe a large part… but the Open Web will balance this and that is where RSS/Atom comes back into focus. And that should matter more to some tech writers who gloss over the big picture and use trite headlines and concepts to lead into a rash article. But hey, they open the door for others to clean the mess by blogging more in-depth perspectives.
So as we soon see more demonstrations of faster RSS…. at least as fast as you’de expect your Email to arrive… The uniquity that Twitter held will continue to dissipate. It will be just another big social network. People may tire of it. People may evolve as most of this becomes normal and ask themselves – why am i using this service when i can do the same thing on my own website or via email or some other cooler service that has better features etc etc. That’s right. Features. At some point, Twitter will need to care about features to stay relavent because everything else is quickly becoming normalized. Choosing between Twitter and Facebook will seem strange. Especially as the content is cross-posted, which is another issue that is ongoing.
It’s also good to keep in mind other emerging technologies like Google Wave and how that may impact our connected digital culture.
I have not been too impressed with Wave so far but I admittedly have not give it a fair chance yet. I see its potential.And since I have mentioned Email a few times here…. It’s also good to think about the future of email. We already have Push Email on mobile devices which in and of itself is as fast as a centralized Twitter. But email is de-centralized. So what happens when we put together Mailing Lists with Push Email? I think we’ll find out
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Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead
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A comment I had posted on:
Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead.
echo does not present a problem that cannot be logcially and easily handled.
echo should work in tandem with traditional comment option. the UI could handle this in different ways such as a few tabs beneath the post, using a sidebar or even a popup.
echo should not replace your own comment system.
every blogger should want to have control over comments. this is not very different than the topic of owning control of your short tracker urls and using your own domain etc. comments are important enough to control in the same way.
in addition to trackbacks/pingbacks, echo can co-exist. just dont disable your own comment system, even if moderated.
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feedburner was an appropriate name
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Just reading this news on Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO…
Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO.
wanted to point out how i never liked feedburner and encouraged people to manage and own their own feeds themselves. in a nutshell…. feedburner could have and should have been replaced with a few really good tutorials on how to make RSS or edit existing RSS (ie on wordpress). feedburner took advantage of the lazy blogger and attempted to monetize the fuck out of it with a fallover of simply controlling one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive components of the web.
feedburner BURNED RSS and those who were too lazy to own it themselves.in essence, this is similar to twitter. twitter is for the lazy blogger as well. and now the plethora of mainstream users who never likely would have blogged or maintain a website for free expression etc… yeah twitter is all that noise. not that there’s anything wrong with that
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GTweet
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Interesting and clever twitter integration with google reader:
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a random thought posted at 3:03 PM on August 31, 2009 |
I need a wordpress plugin that works differently than what I can get from Twitter Tools plugin(s). I tihnk all I want is to optionally and manually choose to post a blog post I am writing/editing to twitter and customize the tweet text and use my own short url. Until I find or build this, I am disabling this blogs twitter integration. Any suggestions?
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a random thought posted at 11:21 PM on August 29, 2009 |
recently decided to set aside a night or two to prototype tweetmore.info. the name sais it all. it will be a mashup web service. since twitter metadta api is limited for tweets, i will allow for additional metadata to be added with a “synch to twitter” option that will sit in idle until twitter properly provides such a metadata api with key-value storage. this is low priority but something will eventually be put up at this site within 30 days.
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Twitter Tools for WordPress
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I have this plugin installed but annoyed that the main feature I wanted and thought it had does not seem to actually exist. I wanted to only send posts to twitter that are in the microblog category. Damn!
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I’ve started to get emails from test us…
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I’ve started to get emails from test users of tweetftp.com that want more features and enhancements that were discussed/mentioned. Need a few hours to bang on it and appease the hungry file sharers. I noticed that filesocial.com updated their stuff. nice improvements.
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twtlbl is similar to an idea i myself ha…
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twtlbl is similar to an idea i myself had. http://www.yottashare.com/twitlbl/Default.aspx nice to see this experiment. my idea was going to be a webapp and a command line script that would work like whois or finger – tweetmoreinfo -
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wonder what it would be like if i opened…
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wonder what it would be like if i opened up this domain, vocal.ly, for others to use as a way to share links with commentary. in other words, if you want to share a link, you would use a vocally bookmarklet or just login to this wordpress mu site and write a short post with the link you want to share. the post would get published to your twitter, @vocally and obviously posted on this site. the link that gets posted to twitter etc would be a vocal.ly short url instead and people would read your comments and see the full url that they can follow and/or leave a comment on the vocal.ly post.
not a replacement for rapid url sharing but does nudge people to have a threaded discussion off of twitter while being safer since you know the link will hit the vocal.ly multi-user wordpress blog where you can see the long url and participate in discussions.
http://a.tinythread.com is a little side project of Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and has had some decent momentum as a simple place to have discussions initiated by a tweet. well i suppose this is the same idea
except it would use Wordpress and have a built-in short url. Could also include a secondary short url for the url that is referenced in the post. Like vocal.ly/go/qwe for remote url and vocal.ly/rty for the local post. this sounds like it would be best if it were a wordpress plugin for WPMU.
something to think about at least.