Twitter has a massive future...I just hope they continue to open up their API (public XMPP, etc.) so developers can tap into the ever growing resource!
I'm not a big fan of the billion webapps created everyday which uses Twitter in some way which doesn't dig deep under the skin of the ecosystem, I'm more interested in the fact that twitter is (or will become) a live database of everything happening in the world.
> I'm more interested in the fact that twitter is (or will become) a live database of everything happening in the world
That's the first description of twitter I've seen yet that actually makes it sound like something interesting, however, I still don't see how it's any different that calling IRC or NNTP a live database of everything happening in the world.
Twitter still seems to be like something kids are all excited about for no real reason other than they're too young know it's all been done before in various forms.
You're focusing on the technology of twitter, which isn't exciting or innovative at all. What's interesting about twitter is that they've made it extremely simple and accessible for non-techies, who have no idea what IRC or NNTP are, and don't care. As a result, it's breaking into the mainstream and rapidly becoming the "live database of everything happening in the world".
Could this have been done with IRC? Probably. But it wasn't.
I'm a software developer, of course I'm focusing on the technology, I can't help it. So let me ask you this, how can a developer try and see things from the perspective of not looking at the tech more effectively?
Build something and then go find some regular non-technical people and watch them try to use it. Go to starbucks and show it to people. Ask your family and friends to play with it. It'll be painful at first, but you'll learn a lot.
Ultimately, I'm a big fan of finding a design / UI person who really knows their stuff. The difference is incredible.
My parents are open to trying new technologies, but they aren't particularly technically skilled. They've been around tech all their lives, but they were never the ones that were into it. A large portion of my uncles and on both sides were, so they've had a lot of exposure. But they're unaware of a lot of the details.
Anyway, I've found out that I can learn a lot about how technology interacts with people by talking to them about it. Recently, I've had a few interesting web site ideas, and, after talking to them about it, I've learned what parts of ideas are complicated and what parts are not. Focusing on the simpler aspects means they're more likely to understand (and therefore use) whatever it is I'll eventually build. So, possibly try to think about ideas that way. If you were a user, how would you think about the tech?
Someone recently commented on the fact that even though I was sitting at a computer, I pulled out my phone to tweet about something interesting that just happened. I think this shows Twitter's genius: us young whippersnappers are already addicted to text messaging, and Twitter is the perfect application for texting. Not all services work well through SMS, but Twitter does. Look at its popularity in Japan. This means quite a few people already know how to use it, and some people start their Twitter accounts via phone, and never use it in any other way.
A. I still don't think twitter is genius and I'm only 34, so I don't feel that I'm just too old.
> I pulled out my phone to tweet about something interesting that just happened.
B. Why? I don't understand the personality type who finds publicly announcing their every little thought as something attractive.
Kids these days seem to think all this social connection is such a great thing but from what I see they're all broken and can't do anything alone without first bouncing the idea of 10 friends for social approval. Has there ever been a more insecure generation? Truly giving meaning to the word "sheeple".
Kids these days have virtually no focus and don't appear to think deeply about anything because they're so continually distracted by texting, cell phones, twittering, that they can't sit still for 2 hours to watch a film and actually pay attention enough to enjoy it. I take my 15 year old daughter to a movie, of her choosing, and I want to smash her phone into the ground and strap her head to the back of chair just to make her pay attention to the damed movie that she picked and is making me watch.
Sigh...another "kids these days" rant? Really? Every generation thinks that the generation after them is going down the tubes. It's bullshit, just like it was when the people from the generation before yours whined about people your age. Generations change and adapt to the social conditions of their era...kids these days have problems, sure, but so does every generation.
Some of what you're talking about just comes with maturity. You were probably a lot more annoying and immature at 15 than you remember.
You know, not all "kids these days" rants are wrong or just old people not understanding. These new communications mediums we have available to us will have both positive and negative consequences.
Many such rants are trying to point out some of the apparent negative consequences; it's naive to assume that we understand the potential side effects all this technology will have on future generations and it's ignorant to refuse to discuss them because previous generations also bitched about "kids these days".
I didn't say the next generation was going down the tubes, I said they were broken and seemed to have less ability to focus deeply than people my age seemed to have at that age. I'm sure in other ways they're more advanced than we were, such as computer skills and social skills.
Rather than just blowing off my statement as another rant, try replying to it with an actual argument because bullshit it is not.
As a father, I have every right to be worried about the next generation and much first hand experience witnessing it. Try to unplug a kid these days, make them go outside and play, entertain themselves without computers, tv, and cellphones and constant connection to their virtual friends on myspace. It's fucking scary, they can't do it, they don't know to entertain themselves or be alone.
...Has there ever been a more insecure generation?...
...Kids these days have virtually no focus...
...I want to smash her phone into the ground and strap her head to the back of chair...
...It's fucking scary...
First, your statements are hyperbolic to the point of being pointless. You're extending your extremely narrow and biased experience to millions of people and writing off a generation wholesale. Nothing productive comes of this.
Second, I clearly said that there are things about the newest generation that are negative, so it's not that I'm assuming we understand all the side effects. But you didn't present any of your arguments from that perspective, so much as "Kids today are fucked up. Why, back in my day..." This rewrites history to ignore all the negative things about your generation and all the positive things about the current generation. I don't really believe that one generation is overall better or worse than another. They're just different and they live in such different environments that comparison is somewhat pointless.
I don't understand it. On the one hand you have people like you who make the claim that kids these days are developing an overdependence on society. On the other hand you have people claiming that our devices are preventing us from interacting with other people (i.e. kids playing video games all day or whatever). I think the fact of the matter is that you can't talk about a generation with blanket statements. People are different and they play differently. Some will play alone, while others will go out into the neighborhood and try to play with other kids.
A lot of my friends follow me on Twitter. Three or four of us were hanging out, and someone said something that I thought was really funny. So I tweeted their joke. It's no different than talking to them normally.
> from what I see they're all broken and can't do anything alone without first bouncing the idea of 10 friends for social approval.
You've never asked someone for advice? Also, a lot of people my age (I'm 23) just don't really care about a lot of things. "Where do you want to go to eat?" "I don't know, you pick." "I don't want to pick, I picked last time." "Wendys?" "Sure." Is this what you're talking about? This kind of thing happens a lot, and it's because we just really don't have a strong opinion about a subject at all. It's easier to make someone else pick, when Wendy's and Burger King are basically the same thing. It has nothing to do with approval, and everything to do with laziness. I can see you making an argument that that's just as bad, if not worse, but I don't see a problem with being lazy about where we eat dinner today.
> ... they can't sit still for 2 hours to watch a film and actually pay attention enough to enjoy it.
Have you ever considered that maybe your idea of enjoyment is different than theirs? Maybe they didn't like the film already, and stopped paying attention. One of the things that I find interesting is how much more information I consume on a daily basis than my parents. I spend quite a bit of time on the Internet, and I'm usually listening to music, talking with some friends in person, and texting a friend who isn't there... all at the same time. It's just normal. Multitasking is how things are. Is this good? Is this bad? I'm not here to say one thing or another. I'm just a little biased.
I was stuck in traffic driving home from Lake Tahoe the other week. I scanned the AM channels for 30 minutes trying to find a traffic report to figure out what was going on. Then it hit me, search twitter for "tahoe traffic" and sure enough the first tweet was a report that CHP had stopped traffic due to icy conditions. I got off the highway and took a different way home.
Blogging was possible before all the popular blogging platforms appeared; you just had to deal with all the headaches of maintaining a site. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the technology behind Twitter is groundbreaking, it's just dead simple to post an update over it from any computer or cell phone. Because it's now so universally accessible, non-geeks can do it. Which has made it trendy. Which is making it grow.
I think one of the most important lessons that developers can take away from Twitter is to make cool or useful technology available to everyone -- lower the technical barrier to entry.
one of the most important lessons that developers can take away ... lower the technical barrier to entry
This is one of those statements that is so blindingly obvious yet insightful at the same time. I really don't know why programmers don't get it: nobody cares about the technology, they only care what you can do for them.
I'm building my first webapp. I'm an embedded software developer: what I know about HTML, CSS & web programming could fit into a thimble. But it's enough to build the app I want to do. The thing is, if I were to bounce the idea off a few programmers I'd immediately hit with resistance: "so and so is already doing it," "no, you need to add this..." "why would anyone use that when they could use Excel..." etc.
My idea isn't groundbreaking or innovative. I'm just taking a common task that many non-technical people need to do and simplifying it. And hopefully I can make it easy enough to use that they will part with enough of their hard-earned dollars each month to make it worth my time.
> I think one of the most important lessons that developers can take away from Twitter is to make cool or useful technology available to everyone -- lower the technical barrier to entry.
I think that's a lesson we developers should definitely keep in mind more. Frankly, it's hard because we forget just how much we know and things that seem trivially easy to us end up being hurdles to the average user and many of us are simply unaware that it's a hurdle.
In all honesty, it's difficult to be a software developer for a few years and not come out thinking most users are just plain stupid.
What's intriguing to me is that they started with less features. I'll explain.
When some new thing comes onto the scene, like IRC or KaZaA or whatever, it is usually very shaped, the creators have a specific use patten in mind. And so they stock up on all the features that they think you're going to want. Twitter seems different (not using it myself). It comes with less features.
And now, having listened to that talk, I can see that originally it came with no "features" whatsoever beyond the starter "hunch", a sort of an objectified idea.
Actually, Clay Christensen's definition of disruptive innovation is new technology that has fewer features than existing technology. The new technology finds uses amongst a previously under-served constituency, and then improves in features until it serves existing users better than the old technology did.
I seem to recall an interview discussing with Ward Cunningham his invention of wikis.
What is interesting to me is not the fewer features but the intelligent selection of only the important ones. I am still amazed by the prescience of Cunningham and Williams.
How the 140 character limit was reached is also interesting; I don't think it's mentioned in the TED video, but it was discussed here: http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6575
I did actually mean both. They have less of simpler features, a clear and focused solution to a problem that did not exist (or did exist, but wasn't obvious).
I really love that, the "less is more" approach, the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy. Just like UNIX utilities can be piped together to form a new solution, their service is participating in similar "chains" to become a part of something more.
That last sentence is there just to mess with you mate. :)
Thanks for pointing out ambiguity in my writing.
i wouldn't call it less features, in general. it's more of finding a good design, an elegant solution. it's understanding the problem really well, distilling out the essential elements, and creating a platform that solves that problem really well, as in fast and easy, with as few obstacles as possible.
it's this focus and lack of obstacles and elegance that actually makes good technology flexible. irc and kazaa add on all these features to solve many problems, which add obstacles to understanding and use, removing elegance, removing flexibility and usability.
Speaking of his experience with first blogger and now twitter:
"I'd learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they will go". Great take-away. I also thought it was interesting how the seeds for twitter had been a project Jack Dorsey had been apparently working on for a number of years.
Williams is right. Users will always find more creative ways of using your product than you can think of. The best thing to do is keep things open and stay out of their way. The other tech company I think is great at this is Mozilla.
C'mon, give the guy a break. He's presenting to a non-trivial fraction of the movers & shakers of the world, and probably doesn't have a lot of presentation experience.
I'm not a big fan of the billion webapps created everyday which uses Twitter in some way which doesn't dig deep under the skin of the ecosystem, I'm more interested in the fact that twitter is (or will become) a live database of everything happening in the world.