2009-06-10
Twittering Everything
I always thought that one of Jaiku’s big mistakes is that it did too many things. In trying to be a repository of presence, it managed to build everything Twitter has, but submerge it in a pile of other features, such as conversation and aggregation.
By contrast, Twitter always did one thing, and arguably, for significant chunks of the time it’s been around, it’s not even done that well - take a short text string and propagated it to your friends, and (possibly) interested bits of the world. Yet, three years into the site’s journey from alpha geek hangout to claims (and denials) of infrastructure status, all the features Jaiku built in from the start are slowly, painfully, being hacked in (almost always by third parties).
For example, the in_reply_to attribute (where it’s not left off by sloppy coding or usage) allows threading of conversations, although there’s still not an interface as nice as Jaiku’s single page. However, it’s really aggregation I’m curious about. Twitter is now being seen as a fine place for link propagation, despite its numerous flaws - searching is hard, there’s no ability to show page titles, let alone tags or a decent length description, and of course the URLs end up obfuscated by shortening services¹.
In addition, people are wedging photographs onto the site, using Twitpic and similar services; music, via Spotify, ping.fm and suchlike; and of course there have been RSS to Twitter services for years.
This is all despite the fact that, as archival systems go, Twitter is beyond useless - the shift to the infinite-page ‘More’ button and the complete lack of any sort of dated archive mechanism means finding things you’ve said in the past is almost impossible. No, the motiviting factor is almost certainly because Twitter is excellent for getting audiences: “I’ve seen/posted/listened to this and you really need to know that!”
Personally, I want my stuff collected in one place that I control, and I still prefer to put things in the place they fit best; photos on Flickr, links on Delicious and so on. Maybe this is going to seem as old fashioned as wanting separate electronic devices when something converged can do it all, even if it’s not as good at each individual function.
¹ Waking up in the morning and going through the stack of windows opened from links from Twitter is an exercise in “who posted this and why?” far more often than I’d like. I should probably try to remember to use Microplaza more.
