Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of Twitter apps?

You aren't the only one thinking it's a waste of resources. However I learned a little bit from the argument I received when I submitted about this recently.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417522

In my post I was speaking to the "I did this in X hours" kinds of projects I was seeing. I said there ought to be better problems to hunt down and solve. Some railed against me saying I didn't talk about big enough problems. Some said beginners ought to do things that are "quick and easy" as to gain feedback and see a project through.

I don't buy any of that. I'm going on my 10th year of software development and almost everyday I find myself feeling like a beginner. And I still see Twitter based apps finding "oops" in tweets to be a pretty big waste when our school systems can't properly share data. However I obviously haven't found a way to articulate my feelings in the best way yet.

I learned that not everyone cares about "good problems". They care about "cool problems". The good problems are the ones that are hard and may take more than 4 hours to really even understand. And probably quite longer to solve. The cool problems are much different. They aren't problems really and are mostly made up features looking for an audience.

There are many people smarter than I that will call Twitter a protocol and liken it to the next sliced bread. I look at the schools my daughters will be attending and I wonder why they can't get their crap together.

Quick, rattle off 3 small Twitter applications that would improve a school system. I'll start: snow days. Homework announcements. A continuous discussion with teachers and parents about curricula. Volunteering.

I'm not in love with Twitter, but the value is apparent to me: it's a social networking tool that just gets out of the way.

Just to be clear, I have my own project for the education space, it just isn't "twitter" like.

I don't want it to look like I'm pissing and moaning without contributing to the solution.

I'm not saying you're goldbricking, I'm saying that you might be underestimating how far Twitter can ride the network effect.

that's a good point. it is also true that us geeks tend to be too into technology, rather than understanding the people and situation actually using the solution.

i don't use twitter or SMS, and i use my cell phone simply for free calling with my folks, so i don't assume that twitter apps (or cell phone apps) could help students or school administrators.

knowlege about the market is always a far more significant unknown for me than technological unknowns.

Aren't the first too the kind of thing you can do just as well by subscribing to an RSS feed?

From where? By setting up a blog? You lose.

Not to derail, but a friend of mine has a "Twitter for schools" that's been getting a ton of traction - http://www.edmodo.com

(He's an IT guy at one of the suburban school districts out here, which is why he knows exactly what his users want.)

>I learned that not everyone cares about "good problems". They care about "cool problems".

Exactly, and sadly true.

Twitter's more than a company. It's a new protocol. (That's what makes it such a big deal; new protocols are rare.) So it is no more wrong to find lots of people building things on it than it would have been, at the corresponding time, to find lots of people building things on http or email.

Well, except that Twitter is a private company and its API is proprietary in that sense, unlike http or email. (Maybe a better analogy would be people building MS Outlook plugins, way back when.)

I'm just not convinced that it's more than a fad within the development community, and I'm even less convinced that if it is indeed something more than a fad, it will remain confined to a single company's API.

But I've been wrong plenty of times before and I doubt anyone will notice if I'm wrong again. :)

But, people _could_ adopt http://identi.ca, and help make laconi.ca a better distributed platform and then transition to it. This isn't bound to happen though, but it _could_.

To the extent that any "more open than twitter!" competitor begins to gain adoption, twitter can simply open up a little bit to kill it.

Knowing this, why would anyone put a big financial and infrastructure commitment into a more-open twitter clone?

laconi.ca is OSS and can't be killed. All it needs is volunteers and users, and a turn to the dark side by Twitter would supply them. As such it makes a nice "sword of Damocles".

But, if Twitter opens up a bit we all win! Ultimately, laconi.ca is attempting to be a distributed, open Twitter. Any more openness in Twitter will help make that happen, because laconi.ca can take advantage of new API methods to build abstractions for it's own distributed service protocol.

It is a bite more than a fad. I met someone and told them I was doing a startup and she did not know what a startup was. After I explain her that I wanted to create a tech company she seemed to understand a bit more but still proceeded to yarn. Fast forward three weeks later she asks me if I knew about Twitter "this website that.....". "This Website" showed me that Twitter was now mainstream.

Way back when? So Xobni is an example of "what is old is new again." (I had no idea there used to be a ton of Outlook plugins...)

Some are still around, See for example http://www.caelo.com/

I agree that it's a new protocol. I also think that because it's a new space and people are always dissatisfied with how they interact with it, coupled with the rather easy development, is pushing the myriad of apps.

I'm developing one, but even though the space is growing more and more crowded I'm not concerned. It's not being done as a primary source of income, but as a side project to help build my development skills as it provides unique problems which I don't face in my day to day web development.

The api to the service provider may be seen as an application protocol, but Twitter is a platform.

You are not tired of Twitter apps. You are tired of someone slapping something together without much due diligence, calling it a startup, and hopping they will get techcrunched, raise venture capital and finally get acquired early on for the low 7 figures. That's what you are tired of.

But you cannot blame someone who is trying to make it out of the rat race. At least they are competing. They will probably build 12 "stupid" apps before finding lucky 13. That last one will be the result of their pointless Twitter apps and honest feedbacks.

I'm not /tired/ of them, but I'm not interested in most of the apps that relate with how people use twitter: twitter clients, twitter recommendations, etc.

What I am EXTREMELY interested in is two things:

1. Data-mining twitter 2. Twitter as an interface for other (standalone) applications such as rememberthemilk, sugarstats, mymilemarker, etc.

Data-mining and the ability to respond to Twitter users looking for something would be huge.

Twitter kind of seems to be one of those you "get it" or you don't things right now. Some people are wild fans, other people think it's a worst-of hybrid of IRC and SMS.

I've been using Twitter, and I find it mildly entertaining. The business uses somewhat elude me, as the more people you follow the harder it is to see the nuggets of useful info in between updates of the weather and what people are eating for lunch.

The marketing types obviously love Twitter, but they seem to consume any new mechanism for connecting with "eyeballs" at rapidly increasing alarming rates.

So, I'm not tired of the Twitter apps. Some of them have been useful or interesting to me (there was one today, whoshouldifollow.com), and others that seem completely useless (won't name names).

Note, I may be biased as I just started (literally 12 hours ago) building my own twitter app last night

It doesn't bother me that there is innovation, but I do get tired of seeing them on Hacker News unless it is something that has been created by someone/group I consider part of the hacker news community

But that's because I would be interested in any hacker created product. I enjoy some of the "I did this in X hours" kinds of projects

On days when I'm not in the mood for it, I let them slide

Of course, I'm not saying anybody else's opinion is less valid - some people may be sick of them, and I can understand that. I get tired of seeing updates to stories that I wasn't interested in to begin with, but there is little I can do about that as well =)

Some people never learn what the true meaning of a sharecropper is. If you're developing an app for Twitter, make it a part of your marketing budget and don't build your whole business around it.

I'm tired of all these apps asking for my password.

if you are supposed to build an app, which absolutely needs a password, what would you do?

don't blame that developer. blame Twitter for doing lousy job. Look at how FriendFeed handles Password requirement by giving Remote Key.

Developers are not happy to ask users passwords in text format. They simply don't have other option.

I'm not blaming the app creators. I think Twitter and other sites need to learn from FriendFeed.

I've noticed this trend as well.

I think the lesson here is that the simpler the idea, the better. Let communities of people who care do the work for you. If you can provide some sort of platform, even if it is something as simple as: "140 chars or less text comments, sent to people who choose to see them, and allowing these text comments to be sent from multiple sources."

Don't get me started about how over hyped twitter is. It's got a great name and got insanely lucky with its adoption... and if someone could write up a blog entry about how they got so popular that would be great as well. They must have had some popular early adopters.

Back to the "app a day" (pun intended) topic. I wonder to myself, are these apps meant to make money, or are they just people playing around? Have any serious twitter apps, besides summize, been acquired?

I think the more abstract trend, at the moment, is "hack something together in a few days and see what happens." Things along the line of http://nowdothis.com.

My gut tells me they see a spike in traffic, then nobody really cares. What people want now is stuff that connects them to other people, easily. JuicyCampus, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. It's about being social in the right way.

Having recently moved back to London, and experienced the world of the corporate commuter, I firmly take the line that any entrepreneurial activity that is not illegal or immoral should be celebrated. The real waste in places like the UK remains the lack of preparedness to create something and try to make some money from it.

I'm tired of them, too. However, here are a few areas where I think building a Twitter app can be useful.

First, if you take advantage of the fact that a semi-interesting Twitter app can get lots of press right now, you can use it as a way to promote your real money-maker app. For hackers, it's probably way more fun (and cheap) to spend a day building an app than sending 50 Emails to bloggers begging for a post.

Second, if you truly do it on your downtime for your the pure joy of imagining something and seeing it come to life. Wasting time is relative, it's more productive than watching TV, playing WoW or Xbox, random web surfing, etc...

Nope. Its all just mass experimentation. 100 apps may come but 8 will stick. You can either participate in the mass testing or just kick back and watch for the sticky ones to surface in adoption.

There are probably too many Twitter apps, esp in the "me too" category, but Twitter is worth that effort in general. It's rare that any web-based service platform changes the way you function and Twitter has definitely done that not only for me, but for a lot of people I know and not just the tech crowd.

We see a lot of garbage Twitter App these days; mostly people don’t think trough before posting some crap online. Because Twitter idea and app look and feel so simple folks think they can just bring anything up and hit the jackpot.

This should apply to any App idea: Think the dam thing thru before making fun of yourself!!!

I am sick of the recency bias. It turns smart programmers into blackbirds with the "oooh shiny" phenomenon. People are spending more time keeping up with things that just don't matter. I know I certainly spend much less time scouring research sites (pubmed/citeseer et al) than before.

I wonder why twitter doesn't build a application platform like facebook?

They don't need one since they have an open api. They're not a walled garden like Facebook.

I agree, it's another form of throwing sheep.

Haha, I had the same thought today : http://twitter.com/officiallyrad/status/1102966972

(I know, kind of ironic I posted it on twitter...)