LukasRos' Blog

• 2012-08-18

  After API Changes: Is app.net the future of Twitter?!

  Twitter has finally explained the exact changes for their API. This has propably been the most discussed topic on the tech blogs I frequent. ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Frommer tried to explain that Twitter is trying to save their own future: They want to remain independent (even though there may be interested buyers), which is only possible with billion dollar advertising revenues, which in turn is only possible if Twitter controls the eyeballs of its users. Another post on ReadWriteWeb, from Dan Rowinski, endorsed the changes. The author’s main objective is that he wants Twitter to survive (and he tells the story of the major third party clients). Martin Weigert from netzwertig gave his take on the subject the title “Twitter is getting serious: The end of the open platform” (in German). He’s also trying to look at it from all angles, but most voices heard appear to be negative.

  My attention towards this issue was pointed a few weeks back and at that time I wrote about LinkedIn vs. Twitter, which had just turned off Twitter-to-LinkedIn syndication (with the opposite direction still in place). On the same day, I found this tweet:

  Dear Twitter, I’m happy to pay you each month for a pro subscription. Others will be too. Now stop fucking up the API.

  — Aral Balkan (@aral) June 30, 2012

  Could this be a solution? Asking users to pay? There was one person who thought so: Dalton Caldwell. Instead of just mourning, he decided to create an alternative. And he was able to raise $600.000 in a Kickstarter-like campaign for his project. His site, app.net, charges $50 per year to users and $100 to developers and promises to never show ads.

  Will app.net be successful? I’m not sure. Probably it will not be a Twitter replacement, and maybe it even doesn’t want to. On ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus writes that we should understand app.net as microblogging as a service, something like Evernote or Dropbox (which have a lot of paying users). I’m curious how this project will turn out. Maybe the whole situation will also give a boost to decentralized solutions such as status.net/identi.ca. Who knows?!

• 2012-06-30

  LinkedIn vs. Twitter

  Everything I blog about here goes to my blog’s Twitter account @LukasRosBlog, which in turn is imported to my LinkedIn profile. Well, it used to be! Today morning I received a mail from LinkedIn and there is a blog post with the same words:

  As Twitter shared earlier today in a blog post from Michael Sippey, they are increasingly focused on “providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools.” Consistent with Twitter’s evolving platform efforts, Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn starting later today.

  The aforementioned blog post from Twitter’s Michael Sippey talks about the new expanded Tweets, or “Twitter Cards”, which allow content such as images, videos, text snippets and possibly even interactive content to be displayed inside a Tweet. Since third party clients may not be able to deliver them properly, Twitter doesn’t want their users to use them. This is not news and it was told to developers before:

  Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”

  It’s surely not a coincidence that both companies posted to their blogs at almost the same time, as TheNextWeb’s Matthew Panzarino notes. So there are a few possible explanations for LinkedIn’s move:

  1. LinkedIn doesn’t want to display extended Tweets in the way Twitter expected them to do because it won’t fit in their stream.
  2. LinkedIn doesn’t want to display advertisements from Twitter in their stream (which Twitter announced may be required in future).
  3. LinkedIn feels that the syndicated content from Twitter is noise in their stream. This would be the same reason that Google+ cites when asked why it doesn’t offer external access to their sharing feature, and interestingly the comments on Mashable are overwhelmingly positive and applaud LinkedIn for the decision.
  4. Twitter is simply afraid that people read Tweets on LinkedIn instead of using Twitter itself, so they requested LinkedIn to remove it.  
  5. Twitter wants to separate itself from LinkedIn after the recent password disaster. Mashable’s Kate Freeman raises this point but dismisses it as doubtful herself.

  I guess we’re seeing a combination of reasons here, but even if nothing else, this is a proof that there’s still a kind of war going on in social networking and APIs and that companies have to look for market share and monetization and cannot always play well and fair with everyone else, which is understandable, but sad especially in Twitter’s case which would never have become what it is without its open developer ecosystem, as TheNextWeb mourns.

• 2012-04-13

  What if Twitter would have been invented in the 80s? This #FunFriday video features an MS DOS based client and authentic modem sounds. Wondering if this client actually exists.

  By the way, you can follow my blog on Twitter, my username is @LukasRosBlog.