Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?
twine.com
twine.com
Custom filtering would also allow me to see promising submissions to bubble up to my start page, taking the spots of killed media/hype/iphone/getrich-with-3-lines-of-javascript stories.
I wanted to write such UI myself and just let it be - i.e. I'd crawl HN and generate my own front page but I suspect Paul wouldn't be happy about it.
It's much smarter to go after a niche market where you can easily make milliions instead of shooting for the one in a million chance that you'll make the next facebook. Chances are you won't.
I think it might be hard to find these people to interview though. Domain records and traffic stats and presence can be false starts.
I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days.
Take, for example, me - I'm not the best coder in the world by any stretch of the imagination but I've had a unexplainable passion for animation for about as long as I can remember.
I originally thought the way to "make it" was to follow in other's footsteps, make a web app, flip it etc, but I wholly believe that for this kind of thing to work your heart really needs to be in it. For me this wasn't the case.
This is why I'm following a path that I'm genuinely interested in. The kind of thing that makes me jump out of bed with excitement in the morning and keeps me going until the wee hours in the evening.
It's not a case of thinking about the payoff at the end of day as the only motivation for me to do what I'm doing (although its never too far from my mind) but it's the process I'm obsessed with and the potential of changing the game that keeps me intrigued.
There's just so much ground that has yet been unexplored and I think really, this is the most exciting part of the whole process.
As an experiment, a sort of Twitter honeypot you could say, I followed every single one of them on a fresh dummy account, using a simple Ruby script with the Twitter gem.
Less than a day later I already have more followers than the original 237 I added. I haven't posted a single tweet, so no one has any valid reason to follow me, except to try to gain more followers.
I suspect many of them will unfollow me shortly, after they realize I won't follow them back. I'm saving all the "new follower" emails I get from Twitter, and in another day or so I'll compare them to my remaining followers to see who's guilty.
The vast majority of the unsolicited followers are people peddling some sort of bullshit get-rich-quick MLM scheme.
http://ericholscher.com/blog/2009/mar/15/twitter-spam/
A basic outline of my arguments:
Hypertweeting/Notification Overload: Unfollow
Hashtag spam: Same as real spam problem, just need selective aggregators that only follow certain people, or some sort of (bayesian?) filtering.
@reply spam: True, but could be solved by clients, and the rate limiting on the api means that you have a low chance of being spammed this way. Plus it's really easy to systematically catch.
I only follow people that I actually want to know about. But being a Facebook friend, up until now, has been much more than seeing occasional newsfeed updates. I've never said "I'll be friends with this person so I'll see their stati," it's always, "I'll be friends so that they can invite me to parties and write on my wall."
Over the last couple days, I've been frantically hiding newsfeed updates from people that I don't care about.
Twitter has the advantage over Facebook in that really the only reason to follow someone is to get their tweets. Soon, friending someone and hiding their updates will be something I think of as one action on Facebook.
I think a 'Flag' API/feature that is similar to Craig's List would work. One vote does not mark you a known spammer, but if many users flag you and your tweets as spam, Twitter could throttle/disable your reply capabilities.
But for now, neither spam @replies (which happen occasionally too) nor spam #hashtags violate the TOS, I believe.
From what I can tell, given the new Facebook UI, all Facebook needs to do to implement twitter is:
* Streamline directed relationships (fan versus friend) for "follow" functionality
* Streamline status privacy settings (so that changing your status can be equivalent to a tweet)
* Write lite.facebook.com that looks just like twitter/jaiku/etc
In addition, it seems to me that Facebook has the following advantages over twitter:
* Funding: 500mm versus 50mm
* Scale Facebook has many more users and engineers
* Platform/Apps Facebook has a rich platform, twitter doesn't
Thoughts?
That being said, I will be sad if Twitter is subsumed by Google or Facebook.
EDIT: Technically easy but Facebook is a good walled-garden (privacy controls). I don't know if they'll let some public weeds in just to compete with Twitter. Twitter allowing Facebook users to auto-post an update to their Twitter identity could work.
Since their popularity isn't based upon their technology, beating them requires a hell of a lot more than just duplicating their technology.
But before we dig into this problem, let us pause for a moment and reflect on the age-old terrible plight of the tool developer. Twitter developed a tool that could not be spammed. So the users went busily to work, layering a spammable protocol on top of it. And now those users demand that someone figure out how to keep the spam out of their spammable protocol. In the meantime, Twitter gains a reputation as a system that's filled with spam.
Perhaps it is time for a corollary to Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: "Every social application evolves until it fills up with spam. Those that cannot be filled up with spam are replaced by those that can." Though I guess Doctorow proposed this theory years ago when he wrote All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites: