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Comment by fitzwatermellow | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, @jack

Would love to see twtr become a platform for a myriad of third-party apps. Wouldn't it be great to place a market order by messaging @bats "buy $TWTR 10,000 30.00". Or order a limo with @uber "2 people in one hour to jfk airport"?

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> Or order a limo with @uber "2 people in one hour to jfk airport"?

Why would typing out a generic request to a several square mile area without any identifying information be better than a GPS enabled app with real time communications, mapping, and integrated payment?

I see this kind of comment all the time (eg that ridiculous "magic" SMS startup) and always wonder how otherwise rational, linear thinkers develop this delusion.

And it depends on what's at hand. If your phone is basically a Twitter machine, maybe. This will be more easily accomplished by talking to Siri or Google Now.

You describe a tech problem, and not a really intractable one. It already has "real time communications (as, yknow, the main purpose of the service)", it can already do GPS coords, and expect payment integration soon.

I'd love to see Twitter become a "command line of the web". Add voice integration on top of it via siri/google/etc, and it come become the plaintext glue between a lot of services.

What we have here is a pub/sub message transmission layer that just happens to be used by a lot of people for personal communication. Having machines use that for other things is something that's already been experimented with - using it as a de-facto API layer is a logical step.

But this is nonsensical. As far as I can see there are two parties to this hypothetical transaction, me the smartphone owner, and Uber the company. I open the Uber app and use it.

Why do I want to insert Twitter in the middle of this transaction? What problem is it that you're trying to solve?

The problem that you need a unique app to interact with every single service out there. How do you feel about random websites pushing you onto their application and then neglecting the web experience? It's fragmentation city.

This is the same problem, but for services (in the people doing things for other people sense) rather than hypertext.

Think of it as a glue layer that gets you around the need to have 50 different apps installed for 50 different services.

> The problem that you need a unique app to interact with every single service out there.

This is not an actual problem. And to the extent that it is 140 characters of text doesn't come close to fixing it. And in the unlikely event that it did why wouldn't SMS do the same thing without having to bring some random third party company into the mix and have both parties at their mercy for zero value added?

This is not an actual problem.

We disagree there. It's annoyance waiting to be solved. Here's a hypothetical, realistic interaction, and as a bonus, one that isn't any less useful due to the length limit:

    >>@friend: Want to catch lunch today?
    @friend: Sure, I'll set that up. Cya there!
    @restaurant Reserve a table for 2 at noon for Karunamon
    >>@restaurant: Confirmed, we'll see you at noon!
    @traffic: How's the traffic between here and @restaurant?
    >>@traffic: ETA 35 minutes, heavy traffic and construction along the optimal route.
    @restaurant Change that last reservation to 12:30
    >>@restaurant: Confirmed, your noon reservation has been moved to 12:30
    @uber Pickup my location to the closest @restaurant
    >>@uber: Driver is on its way. ETA: 5 minutes. Look for a grey Subaru, plates 1234-56.
    @friend: Catching a ride there, see you in half an hour!

And this is pure user interaction, which is the least efficient way to do things possible. If you can't think up a usage for a widespread pub/sub notification system, kindly get your imagination serviced.

As far as the limit, it's up for revision by the sound of things anyways - and keep in mind the original purpose of that limitation was so a tweet would fit into an SMS. If the limit is what you think breaks this idea, you've disqualified SMS by the same rubric.

You've just described the future of Siri, not the future of Twitter.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a separate walled garden of services based on the particular voice recognition app my phone uses (whether that be Siri or Now or Cortana or...). Using some other service that provides a sane communication layer that everyone already uses means that doesn't have to happen.

While I think Twitter doing this is a bad idea (since Twitter stuff is public), Magic has been absolutely amazing for me. It frees up a ton of time for me. I've never used it for getting an Uber (that's what the Uber app is for), but I have used it for offloading a ton of complicated or menial tasks.

I would really like to hear your reasoning why typing is such requests would make sense for an average user instead of using an dedicated app which automatically supplies the vital information (current price, gps coordinates, etc.)

I agree - Twitter is the de facto messaging platform. Taking the idea a bit further, Twitter could be used instead of SQS and other messaging solutions / protocols. That'd be pretty cool. Twitter could be the way the IoT communicate with their AI overlords.

> Twitter is the de facto messaging platform

In what world?

Twitter is the de facto messaging platform.

Only in your little corner of the world. I honestly don't know a single person who uses twitter on a day to day basis.

And I know hundreds.

Twitter is so common in tech industry circles - so many announcements , debates, and moments happen there weekly that I would think it's essential if you care about that stuff.

Truth is there is no canonical place to get the pulse of what's going on in the tech world: each of Reddit, HN, Twitter, or various aggregation sites have their filter and regulars. But Twitter seems to have the widest net.

>Twitter is the de facto messaging platform.

Twitter is the best broadcasting platform. The true challenges are to control spam level and be able to display enough ads to monetise it.

I'm a late adopter of twitter but if you know how to use it is a great tool: follow less than 20 accounts, info is still possible to digest and the number of ads is not enough to annoy you.

This isn't true. I think you need to expand your horizons beyond the tech world :) I suspect if you ask someone outside of the tech world in the US, they'll tell you Facebook. Outside of the US: WhatsApp.

Twitter: 500M tweets per day https://about.twitter.com/company

WhatsApp: 13B messages per day http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/whatsapp-now-has-700m-user...

Facebook + FB Messenger - WhatsApp: ~30B messages per day http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/22/facebook-voip-not-facebook-...

There is nothing stoping anyone from doing that. I doubt Twitter will do it though.

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