Tweetmarks
Tweetmarks is a web service for setting and getting the "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user. It can be used to "sync" the reading position between multiple Twitter clients and platforms. It was created by Riverfold Software. Also see this blog post introducing the service. All Twitter client application developers: PLEASE integrate this into your clients. As for why Twitter hasn't already implemented this themselves, Marco Arment writes: Unfortunately, I doubt that Twitter’s official Mac and iOS apps will. Twitter has decided, for whatever reason, not to do this to date. I heard a while back that this was because they want people to just read what’s there now, like a river of news, not to try to “keep up” with a potentially insurmountable timeline. They didn’t want to encourage features like this that would allow someone to know how far “behind” they are, because that could cause guilt and feelings of information overload, which could discourage usage. I believe they are wrong in this line of thinking. Moving from Tweetbot on my iPhone to Twitteriffic on my iPad to the Twitter app on my Mac feels like a broken experience. Having to re-read supposed "new" updated over again to figure out my place depending on where I am just feels wrong. Twitter is arrogant in trying to dictate how users should use their service rather than trying to accommodate the reality of how their users currently use Twitter. To quote Marco again: And as long as Twitter doesn’t have an API for it, widespread Tweetmarks support in apps is badly needed for anyone who uses multiple Twitter clients. So if you make a Twitter client, please add Tweetmarks support. Yes, please.
Twitter Reveals Photo Sharing Feature
Jack Dorsey, writing on the Twitter Blog:
Millions of people share photos on Twitter every day. We’re going to make that easier than ever. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you’ll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. A special thanks to our partner Photobucket for hosting these photos behind the scenes. Services like yFrog and Twitpic are in trouble. Other services like MLKSHK who provide more value that just a dump for photos might be okay though.
More iOS 5 & Twitter Integration Speculation
Shawn Blanc posted two links to interesting posts which have more speculation related to possible Twitter integration into iOS 5 system-wide. The first link is to a post by Anil Dash who writes:
But in short, the hardest, most expensive technical part of building a web-scale Twitter competitor already exists in Apple’s infrastructure. What’s missing, in an odd reversal of Apple’s usual pattern, is a well-designed, simple user experience that makes people want to participate. Could a small team of developers and designers within Apple make a credible realtime messaging service with first-rate native clients on every important platform? Could they graft on a simple, REST-based web-style APIs to the complicated, old-fashioned API that enables push notifications right now? It'd be a lot like building a usable, delightful user interface on top of well-established, but complicated, technological underpinnings, wouldn't it? I wonder if Apple has those skills. The other post Shawn links to is by David Silva, who writes: Look at the way Android integrates both Facebook and Twitter into its OS. With that system wide integration I can now scroll through my contact list, see a pretty avatar that is automatically pulled from my friends accounts and also read/reply to recent status updates as well as browse through all of their Facebook pictures all from within the contact card. He later speculates on the specifics Apple could expand on: * DM and @reply options from within your contact card just like FaceTime, text email and call. * Tweet pictures and video direct from the Camera app. * Read and write Twitter DMs direct from the “Messages” app just like regular text messages. * Twitter avatars in your Contacts cards.
Twitter's New Photo-Sharing Service To Get iOS 5 Integration
MG Siegler writing for Techcrunch:
We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device. John Gruber, on Daring Fireball: So close to the bigger story, but yet so far. Imagine what else the system could provide if your Twitter account was a system-level service. Perhaps this whole OAuth/XAuth issue is about to become null & void for 3rd party client developers?
The Fragility of Free
The fragility of free is a catchy term that describes what happens when the free money runs out. Or — perhaps more accurately — when the investors/founders/venture capitalists run out of cash, or patience, or both. Because at some point Twitter and all other companies have to make the move from ‘charity’ to ‘business’ — or, put another way, they have to make the move from spending tons of money to making slightly more money than they spend. Kyle Baxter wrote a follow-up to Ben Brooks' article: Twitter’s value lies in it being a communication utility, where anyone and everyone can quickly communicate information. That’s incredibly powerful, and it simply couldn’t exist if it wasn’t a free service. This doesn’t mean the strategy Twitter pursued is correct; rather, it means their error was in being so cavalier about a business model. They assumed if they reached a critical mass of users, turning it into a profitable business would be easy—and they’ve discovered that isn’t really true. It takes just as much thinking as building the actual product does. Read the first article, and then the second one. Done? Good. You may now resume your normal #dickbar bitching.
Twitter Declares War on 3rd Party Clients
Well, it's official. Twitter has declared war on its 3rd party client developers. Ryan Sarver, Platform lead for Twitter posted a message to developers this afternoon outlining Twitter's policy change. Dave Winer reminds us all that he warned us that one day we would wish we had decentralized from Twitter. I thought he was right then, and still do. The problem is it's hard to move the community. MG Siegler, at Techcrunch, writes:
For much of the past year, the Twitter ecosystem has been in a state of flux. Ever since Twitter bought Tweetie and turned it into their own native iPhone app, third-party developers have been wondering where this would leave them. Further moves by Twitter into Android, iPad, Mac, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and other spaces have only compounded some of this fear. So Twitter has taken some time today in their developer forum to talk a bit about the state of the ecosystem and give some guidance. It’s blunt, but necessary. Specifically, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has a fairly lengthy outline of Twitter’s line of thinking with regard to third-party clients and services. And while there’s a little bit of dancing around the topic at first, it quickly gets very clear: third-parties probably shouldn’t be creating straight-up Twitter clients any further. Sarver notes that Twitter views a “consistent user experience” as very important to them. And it’s something they’re going to hold third-party developers to a very high standard to maintain. But they don’t want them to mimic Twitter’s own experience with their native apps in order to do this. They’ve updated the API Terms of Service to reflect all of this. “Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no,” Sarver writes very matter-of-factly. “If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service. We have spoken with the major client applications in the Twitter ecosystem about these needs on an ongoing basis, and will continue to ensure a high bar is maintained,” he continues. Sarver notes that according to Twitter’s own data, some 90 percent of active Twitter users now use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis to access the service. “We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking,” he writes. The biggest third-party client in the space is TweetDeck, which was in the process of being acquired by UberMedia when Twitter suspended their apps a few weeks ago for TOS violations. I’ve reached out to Twitter to see where TweetDeck and UberMedia stand now with the new rules. So where should third-party developers look towards in terms of developing for the ecosystem? Sarver highlights the following areas: * Publisher tools. Companies such as SocialFlow help publishers optimize how they use Twitter, leading to increased user engagement and the production of the right tweet at the right time. * Curation. Mass Relevance and Sulia provide services for large media brands to select, display, and stream the most interesting and relevant tweets for a breaking news story, topic or event. * Realtime data signals. Hundreds of companies use real-time Twitter data as an input into ranking, ad targeting, or other aspects of enhancing their own core products. Klout is an example of a company which has taken this to the next level by using Twitter data to generate reputation scores for individuals. Similarly, Gnip syndicates Twitter data for licensing by third parties who want to use our real-time corpus for numerous applications (everything from hedge funds to ranking scores). * Social CRM, entreprise clients, and brand insights. Companies such as HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6, Seesmic, and Crimson Hexagon help brands, enterprises, and media companies tap into the zeitgeist about their brands on Twitter, and manage relationships with their consumers using Twitter as a medium for interaction. * Value-added content and vertical experiences. Emerging services like Formspring, Foursquare, Instagram, and Quora have built into Twitter by allowing users to share unique and valuable content to their followers, while, in exchange, the services get broader reach, user acquisition, and traffic. Sarver highlights Twitter’s “diverse ecosystem” of more than 750,000 registered apps. But that ecosystem definitely just got altered quite a bit today. I think that Justin Williams, iOS developer of the popular Elements app sums it up nicely: (paraphrased) "Anyone building a product around a platform in which they have no control, should be wary of the platform, especially a platform that is VC funded." My theory? It's all about the Dickbar. Twitter to users, "Here, have a Dickbar!" Users to Twitter, "We don't like the Dickbar! It covers up our timelines!" Twitter to users, "Okay, we made the Dickbar less sucky!" Users to Twitter, "But it's still a Dickbar! Fine then, we'll switch to Twitteriffic, Echofon, Tweetdeck, Hibari, etc". Twitter sees a large amount of people quit using their client. In-your-face trends ad bar plot foiled! Devises new plan... Twitter to developers, "You can't make clients anymore that don't have our 'user experience' (1)". (1): 'User Experience' = Dickbar. Brent Simmons chimes in as well:
Did Twitter just tell client-app developers to stop?
I’m seriously disappointed by this. Not as someone with a Twitter client, but as someone who likes the service and wants my fellow developers to do interesting things. One of the cool things about Twitter is that the service sparked a bunch of UI innovation on the part of some very talented client-app developers. I want to see that continue. But it’s as if they said: no more. Stop. We’ll take over now. Craig Hockenberry also makes the good point that the reason third-party Twitter clients are so important to the Twitter ecosystem is that they innovated when Twitter did not. One question though...did Twitter release this bombshell on the community on a Friday afternoon where they thought that their userbase would be distracted? On the 1st day of SXSW? On the iPad 2 launch day? I can't decide whether I think the existing news stories of the day (earthquake/tsunami, iPad 2, SXSW) will drown out the news or if SXSW will help to amplify it. I'm hoping for amplification. C'mon nerds, gather ye pitchforks and torches.