notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

2009-06-16

post/124785177

quote 22:02:09
“ The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what makes it so powerful.  There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at twitter.com. ”

Jonathan Zittrain: Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?

This reminds me of something tangential I’ve been meaning to say for a while. I’ve more experience writing apps that work with Flickr, and while I’ve had some people using apps that are hosted on external sites, I always had the impression that fidding around within the site using Greasemonkey scripts was a far more common approach for adding functionality.

By contrast, Twitter has a huge ecosystem not just of client applications, from the basic to the complex, but also a range of websites. Because the core website is so minimal, users almost expect to have to look elsewhere for functionality that any other service would have built in (link expansion, archives, tracking favourites; heck, even search was originally a third party, and it still (sort of) lives on another domain).

In a way, this is annoying, because Flickr users are so hard to get off the site. On the other hand, I think I’d rather use a service that bothered to build things itself.

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Paul Mison's random stuff that doesn't go elsewhere. Is it microblogging, or microactivity?

(Previously known as 'tumblr is my sock drawer', for reasons that are somewhat unclear.)

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