Comments on: Twitter with a Brain

By: hans

hans — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:25:06 +0000

Maybe they’re not an infrastructure play, but an identity play. If they continue to gain traction via the @username namespace, they could stay “sticky” even if the actual messages were going through federated (but Twitter-authed) proxies.

By: Mcburton

Mcburton — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:38:37 +0000

Why not create a bot that follows your timeline looking for commands, when it sees one it executes the logic (defined in some dsl) and then deletes the tweet with the command. Its quick, dirty, but could work.

By: cshotton

cshotton — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:52:36 +0000

@Daniel Maybe you misunderstand how proxies work. They look like a normal API client to Twitter. And they look like Twitter to a normal API client. So neither end should see any difference from a technical or business perspective.

But at the end of the day, I am relatively unconcerned about making money for Twitter. That is their challenge, not mine. They picked a business that is ultimately a commodity infrastructure play. That didn’t work out so well for proprietary email vendors, commercial web server products, or any number of other tools and technologies that form the underpinnings of the modern Internet. Twitter’s role in all of this will probably end up being the first implementation of what becomes a ubiquitous one-to-many messaging infrastructure. If slapping proxy software on top of their platform makes that happen faster, so be it. Users want applications, not server farms and message databases.

By: cshotton

cshotton — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:48:14 +0000

@Ferg That’s the whole point of putting a proxy in the middle. If Twitter is too uncreative to add the features, and the client authors are too hobbled by the constraints Twitter places on them, why not enhance the service and functionality of both from the middle out?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:42:03 +0000

@cshotten: “Twitter is still free to monetize its large user base as it sees fit”. Not if proxies prevent Twitter from ever seeing their users activities. The days of non-targeted adevertising are drawing to a close–Twitter needs demographic, affinity, and habit information on their users to monetize them–if proxies fog that up, Twitter’s value goes down–the more fog the lower their value. They could modify the APIs so that Twitter can allow proxies and still collect the information the need. Google has figured it out. However, as you pointed out, they should have anticipated needing that information and done this all earlier. In stead they are clinging to the direct traffic stream and, again as you pointed out, they are saturated. I thought they had biggere ideas than that simple model.

By: Ferg

Ferg — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:53:14 +0000

@cshotton (#10), in regards to the API: aren’t things like Twitter clients already keeping “something better from coming along”?

By: cshotton

cshotton — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:09:57 +0000

@Daniel I think the business case for proxies has nothing to do with making money for Twitter. Twitter is trying to monetize an infrastructure platform and it will ultimately run out of steam the same way that companies who tried to monetize the HTTP infrastructure ultimately failed in the face of Apache, etc.

Without technical barriers to entry, the only thing they have in their favor is first mover advantage. By wrapping value-add around their infrastructure, an entire for-pay economy can spring up around Twitter. Twitter is still free to monetize its large user base as it sees fit, but the cat is already out of the bag once they published Web APIs and allowed 3rd party apps to build on them.

If I had to guess, proxies and smart clients become the way for a real ecosystem to spring up and make Twitter-like services into a platform that has apps just as rich as those that sprang up on the transaction oriented HTTP network.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:57:20 +0000

The proxy idea will never work for the same reason that you’ll never see a Google proxy–not for technicla reason but for business reasons. That direct connection with the users is the key to monetization. If Twitter were to allow intermediation, they’d lose some control of and access to their user base and suffer diminished ability to monetize it as a result. For a firm struggling to find a business model as it is, that could well be death.

By: Tim Maly

Tim Maly — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:29:14 +0000

Can’t believe that Bo one has metioned this yet: Tweetie 2 for iPhone does what you want. You can specify a custom API base for a proxy service.

So now you just need someone to make the proxy server.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:35:44 +0000

I think the big picture is missing here. The problem is that nowadays everything is done as a centralized, proprietary “web service” owned by one company, whether it’s Twitter or Google or Facebook or whatever. The problem is that Twitter is one of those things, and it will remain stupid as long as it is.

Remember when stuff was made like email, Usenet, FTP, and yes, HTTP? Whatever happened to that?

Trying to create some kind of “platform” out of Twitter is a dead-end. It’s proprietary, it’s centralized, it’s nonsense.