Kevin Systrom On Pulling Twitter Cards Integration
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is what we can't have good things.
Or as Spolsky put it: "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements."
For my money I think Twitter is more dependent on third parties than third parties are on Twitter. Not just Instagram, but the entire ecosystem of apps that grew up around Twitter in the bygone days of warm fuzzies.
Twitter seems like someone throwing a great party who slowly throws out everyone interesting because they want to be the center of attention. Once all the interesting people are gone though, the partiers are trickling out, and the interesting people who made the party hot have moved on.
Really? I mean, in the current scenario? The first-party Twitter apps on mobile devices are pretty strong, enough that I don't even use TweetBot even though I paid for it. And while Instagram was nice, I don't think I used Twitter to view Instagram...in fact, I'm pretty happy with Twitter just being used to share links, with which I click through.
The value of Twitter is that its network effect is such that "everyone" (at least most people in media and tech) are on it. They may have gotten on their through third-party apps, but now Twitter has done an adequate job on their own apps and it'll be awhile before the Twitter network will ever migrate to some other place (and where to, Google+?)
But it's kind of sad that almost nobody is trying to be profitable providing convenience and a smooth experience to their users.
That's why I think App.net. is great!
It's hard to have a consumer product with subscriptions as business model, but I think worth the try. This way you treat the people who make you pay the bills with the respect they deserve.
The issues I have with App.net is that their claims of "we won't screw the user" don't really have any legs to stand on. No company starts out wanting to screw users. But when it comes to turning a profit sometimes you have to put users second. There's nothing built into App.net's model that would prevent that.
Federation bakes that into the model from the beginning. So they're making core claims that aren't built into their core model.
I'm happy to pay for online services like App.net but I wish their messaging would have more sustenance.
Second, it's impossible to get on App.net's social network without paying a significant sum of money. This means a truly diverse set of voices will never be represented on App.net. For more, see “You Can't Start the Revolution From the Country Club” by Anil Dash: http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/you-cant-start-the-revolution...
I have the most hope, long term, for the Tent protocol: https://tent.io It's not ready for prime-time yet, and the existing hosting service is not entirely smooth. But anyone can set up their own provider. We could have some businesses that charge a few dollars a month, like App.net, and put users first, and other businesses that offer free service with ads, and it would all be on the same network, just like the competition among email and web hosting providers today.
I don't mean to be rude or dismissive towards another open-social project, but I have been unimpressed with the design and usability of Identi.ca. OStatus seems to be the work of idealistic folks who hoped they could just make an open protocol and people would flock to it, solely because it was open. Predictably, that hasn't happened. Open is great, but software also needs to provide a great user experience. I think the Tent community gets this.
Tent is also more than a Twitter clone. It already supports private posts, long-form blogging and social bookmarking, unlike OStatus, and in the months ahead it will do much more.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monstarlab...
I do know that the status quo of having a single private company dominating the space is not ideal and would love to see any alternatives take root.
The tl;dr is that Tent is much broader in scope than OStatus while being, at its core, simpler.
Now that they've reached this large critical mass of users they can afford to go back and pull their content from the networks that made it popular in the first place.
Strange that he describes photos posted by users as "our content".
Use our products for "free" and build services on top of them for "free" until we're big enough.
Of course, users will pay the price, with a poor user experience and some additional clicks (plus ads, FB cookies, etc). Pity. That's the problem with being user instead of customer. Nice and free, exactly because we are the product.
I see a Chrome extension coming in 3...2..
edit: well, it was 400k when they launched a few weeks ago, its about 250k now... still huge
It's unfortunate because any site can use Twitter Cards to have their content displayed well in Tweets. So in my mind it's the right approach for a network as large as Twitter. Facebook has similar tags.