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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API."

I think the real problem with this is that Twitter made an even more fundamental mistake early on, which is that they only support text and not data/microformats. That is, there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework in such a way that it automatically gets added to students' dayplanners, no way to list something for sale in a globally searchable way, no way to tweet out a dating profile, etc.

Twitter really should have been the company that enabled the semantic web and became the de facto platform powering the entire thing.

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I'm of the school that one of the worst things Twitter could do is add support for data/attachments, long messages or message bloat in general. The essence of Twitter and its beauty is the messages are short, low overhead and you can skim them very quickly. It compels people to be brief and to not ramble and that is its value and its a good fit for capacity limited mobile. Animated GIF's in Google+ are mostly just annoying.

If you need heavy data then you put a link in the mesage and once people establish they are interested in the subject, then they can go to some server to get the heavy content and all the heavy content isn't centralized at the message service provider.

Also storing and transmitting pictures, video and audio on the message bus dramatically increases overhead, cost and risks of running the service. The second you support it you will have people using it to violate copyrights and laws, you land in a quagmire of shifting standard on what is indecent or illegal in every country in the world. You end up needing a big staff just to deal with take down requests, subpoena requests and to sift though your fire hose to try to eliminate stuff that is going to offend people.

The beauty of short messages is they have very limited capacity to violate laws and copyrights and the message service provider shouldn't be responsile for what is on the web sites the messages link to.

Having integrated image, audio and video support is nice but its actually better if its hosted away from the message bus and decentralized like Twitpic was.

"The essence of Twitter and its beauty is the messages are short, low overhead and you can skim them very quickly."

Adding data wouldn't make the messages any longer, because they'd still be summarized in 140 characters or whatever. The difference is that the actual content would be machine searchable/usable, unlike now where you can add a link but that link is basically worthless unless you're a human.

HTML is machine readable it just has problems with the machine understanding it part. I think you are asking more for a semantic web which hasn't been particularly successful so far. People mostly struggle to just put together a web page that people can understand. Getting them to build diverse information to standards machines can reliably understand is hard. XML has mostly proved this.

I'm not necessarily opposed to their being attachments sitting on Twitter's servers that I can access if I'm interested. I just totally dont want them bombing me with it and sending with the message by default. Their messages are already too bloated. And as I said the fatter the data is the more problems you are going to have with copyright, legality, offensiveness and security risks both for the service and end users.

Seems to me that this isn't a fundamental mistake but a featureset they could still add now. Not that it's on the table at Twitter HQ, but I believe that the window of opportunity to give Twitter the ability to read and provide microformats is still here. Existing clients would get the same tweets, but could be easily extended to link to the web to get the "attached" data.

Your idea makes me swoon, but I think it'll never happen because that isn't the vision Twitter has, not because it's too late.

"Your idea makes me swoon, but I think it'll never happen because that isn't the vision Twitter has, not because it's too late."

That, and also the fact that by now the ship has gotten big enough that turning it around would be virtually impossible. It's not just an issue of breaking third party clients, but also getting buy-in from the company and investors, completely redesigning the UI, etc.

Basically, consider this a free billion-dollar idea for anyone who wants it.

Bravo!

When Twitter introduced annotations, I thought that was the beginning: soon, we would have Twitter classifieds, Twitter marketplace, Twitter as a data firehose for anything... All I was waiting for is annotations in the Search API. I'm positive that's all that was needed to provide the initial infrastructure for semantics -- the community would take care of the rest. Unfortunatelly, not only has it never happened, but Twitter took an entirely different course.

I can understand them, though. They had to start making money fast and took a less risky road. But I can't help thinking: bugger, this could've been so much more than celebrities and hashtags.

I understand how ads seem like a less risky road, but I really don't like using Twitter's website. Nor, am I that crazed about their app. I can't be the only one. It seems like a good way to lose users.

Yeah, what happened with annotations? I also remember being very excited about that. Does anyone know why they canceled that?

> there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework

Surely a link to a URL is all you need to do most of that stuff?

A client could simply provide a way to post semantic data to some location and auto-insert a link to it, and support pulling down documents from those links and act on the data. The downside is a much higher overhead compared for small pieces of data compared to if it was inlined.

Do other services do that already? It sounds like something very useful and not very difficult to build...?

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