The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)
furbo.org
furbo.org
[0] https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/update-twitter-finally-lan...
It's PM god damnit!
"A private message, personal message, or direct message (abbreviated as PM or DM) is a private communication channel between users on any given platform. "
They are all private in terms of intended recipients. They're not cryptographically protected.
On and Off I try with Twitter, but it just doesn't work for me. I would delete my account, but there's so many companies and services who are only accessible via their Twitter accounts, that without an ability to message them, you can't raise an issue.
As an interesting (well, to me) side note, a few months ago I migrated away from being 'Jaruzel' on many sites to 'MattOwen_UK'. Within 24 hours of switching my account name on Twitter, someone else had grabbed @jaruzel. I was surprised at the speed that happened.
And they made nearly every one of those things worse somehow. It's almost impressive.
Twitter was (but no longer) awesome by allowing folks to consume plain text with socially agreed upon meaning rather than features of the client. It's my feeling that instead of piling on more metadata into the posts, they could have done something more similar to RES on reddit, and expanded the text limit.
They've since doubled their length and add bunch of meta information on every post, rendering it basically indistinguishable from any other social network.
Twitter today is running on network effects and brand recognition, not core value. That core value is gone.
This reminds me of how I think back on the "good old days" of playing Warcraft Orcs & Humans, but if I were to try and play it now it would be basically unplayable due to missing features and functions that modern RTS games have accustomed me to.
With regards to tweet length, they definitely do in the form of average tweet length based on different languages. Cant remember where they posted this data, but they found that in more "compact" languages (i.e. languages where you can put more meaning into fewer characters) almost all tweets were under the max length. For languages like English, though, a much higher percentage of tweets bumped up to the max length and then spilled into the next tweet. They basically then optimized the length so that, even when using less compact languages like English, the majority of ideas people wanted to share could fit in a single tweet.
Every social network seems to evolve along the same lines. It starts with a clear concept of what it is, it gets popular based on it, then it starts getting lots of people, and lots of features, becomes a mess, so the timeline gets algorithmic, and suddenly all that's left of the original service is bunch of random noise from random people on your home page/app when you open it, but you keep doing it out of inertia.
Twitter was revolutionary because you DIDN'T have to read someone's long thought on whatever subject. Instead they were forced to keep it short.
You know the saying "I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one"? It's funny, but it's true. It's very easy to spew garbage. Being succinct takes time.
Jokes would be crafted into 140 characters, serious discussion would be a link to your blog.
Back in the day it was better for the geeks. They don't care about all that extra crap as much. But they do care about a simple API they can start hacking with and just drop a status line.
But today it's used by governments, election campaigns and presidents for important PR communication. And by grandma at home. They need those features and don't care about simplicity.
Target groups change as you grow. And that's also why often times original founders and engineers leave because it's not anymore the thing they signed up for. But they get replaced by other people.
Some of the tweets in the article follow that
Thinkingemote "is thinking about triple tags today"
Today people write whole articles in tweet threads. It's terrible.
If your userbase demands a feature so strongly it makes sense to incorporate it!
Twitter and Tweeter were the names of the extraterrestrial intelligent beings written about by Ted Owens, the famous "PK Man". Ted claimed he was given psychokinetic powers by these beings and explains how to contact them yourself in his book [1].
If you read Noah's timeline [2] starting from the earliest tweet, you can see that he was very far out, extremely poetic, possibly high, and frequently refers to entering a "chamber" for extended periods of time.
Coincidentally, in his book, Ted Owens instructs readers how to enter a "chamber" in order to visit Twitter and Tweeter and communicate with them via ESP.
My hypothesis is that Noah Glass, in his "chamber", was attempting to contact Twitter and Tweeter for guidance in his endeavor to create the early version of the platform he named.
Perhaps he succeeded in his attempt. And just maybe he's flying in a saucer somewhere in outer space right now! (Haha, only serious.)
[1] http://ufos.50webs.com/10_en.htm [2] https://twitter.com/noah
Twitter API is now also very much closed, deliberately incomplete, and requires staff approval before you can do anything at all.
Closing down the public API, or at least nerfing it enough to make third-party clients frustrating to use, is the common theme among all social media services that have the business model of eyeball-raping their users. If such a service would have a public API that's enough to build a third-party client, everyone will be using third-party clients, that would of course be much better than the official ones since they're not optimized for those stupid metrics, and thus not seeing ads, not participating in A/B tests for button colors and not sending the Very Important™ analytics.
Takes me back
> Don't help companies for free, they will never repay you.
Is apparently not true, because Rockstar paid that guy for speeding up GTA Online's loading time... but a sample size of 1 is pretty bad data, I'll freely admit.
And Twitter did obliterate its relationships with its dev community. Totally killed it. The motives were sort of understandable in the abstract, Twitter wanted to control its experience and the sheer number of third party clients really went against that. Hell, the whole reason they bought Tweetdeck was defensive, because another company wanted to buy it and Tweetdeck had such huge usage in the brand management/large account Twitter space.
The problem was by going scorched earth, Twitter gave the middle finger to not just developers like Iconfactory and others that created core features, but it really had the add-on effect of abruptly killing all the innovation that happened on top of their platform.
The good news is that over the years, Twitter as a company has changed. The new API isn’t going to be a return to the pre-2013 days, but it does give developers a lot more options and freedom than before. Twitter smartly is still charging for API calls past a certain number and for broader access to the firehose — and it should, to be honest — and that means the days of being able to make good money off of a Twitter client are over for good (even Iconfactory and Tweetbot had to go subscription, which I think is fair for what are now very niche apps), but the new API is huge improvement and I do think the current team is really working to build good relationships with devs going forward, even if they can’t rectify the past.