Calling Twitter’s bluff | Hacker News Reader

Calling Twitter’s bluff

techcrunchit.com

20 pointsbpung10 comments

It might just be me, but I found that to be one of the most baffling, mumbo-jumbo-laden things I've read. I honestly have no idea what he's talking about. The leaps in logic, the speculating and the unfounded assumptions, the inside-baseball jargon, the pulling bits from all over and smashing them together and calling it a theory -- sometimes you just have to shake your head at these folks who are so lost in the weeds.

Not only that, but he called their bluff... and lost.

As per a comment by Paul Buchheit himself: "To be clear, Twitter has made available a realtime replacement for the firehose (the replacement is called "birddog"). We have not yet started consuming that new API because we're waiting for the lawyers to come to agreement on the terms of use, which I hope will happen soon. I think Twitter's legal team is simply overbooked at the moment."

The article is by Steve Gillmor. Every single article of his reads like that -- totally incomprehensible.

Every single statement of his reads like that.

There was a previous Hacker News thread about this guy ("Steve Gillmor's Commenters Revolt"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453250

What I find hard to believe is that continues to write these incomprehensible articles, apparently sincerely, even though he must know that his readers find them incomprehensible. I half expect to wake up some day and find out that Gillmor is a bot or that the joke was somehow on us all along.

Maybe it's just me, but I find this article slightly more comprehensible than his previous articles.

Honestly, it reads like Markov chain-generated text.

I had a really hard time following what the author was trying to convey (and it seems as though I wasn't the only one), but it does bring once concern to mind: Should we be worried that Twitter owns our tweets and is keeping almost exclusive access to them? I feel like we've all grown to depend on Twitter, and it's a shame that microblogging didn't evolve into something decentralized like the regular ol' blogging or (as a larger example) the Internet.

There is an open alternative - http://identi.ca/ - it hasn't really taken off.

This is incredibly speculative – it reads like a social media conspiracy theory. An interesting look into the mind of the author. The way this is written makes it seem like he wrote it furiously and wide-eyed.

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