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Sandals and Pumps

posted by DL Byron on June 01, 2009

Sandals and Pumps

That’s me and Nadia from Hootsuite talking Twitter apps at the 140 | The Twitter Conference Cocktail Party. This scenario plays out at various conferences. Designer types and marketing peeps chatting up technology.

And there was much chatter at the conference — this hash tag, that one, and what apps you were using. It’s like the early days of RSS, this Twitter thing, and really needs bright, creative designers to make good apps. During the “change” panel I was on, we talked about how Twitter would change the way we do everything. Well, we thought RSS was going to do that as well. It didn’t.

“On a panel with @Scobleizer @stoweboyd @jasonp107 and they told me that my refrigerator wanted to tweet me. Cool, would rather my bike do that. #140tc” — 6:21 AM May 28th from web

Pause a minute and think how ridiculous it that we use “hash tags” or try to remember them. Twitter should tell me that or auto-complete them for me. A colleague was concerned recently because she so no results on a particular hashtag. That’s cause she was using the wrong one. Or maybe you didn’t know about substraction filters to remove all the spymaster tweets?

Twitter needs to get smarter

Posting with hash tags, retweets, and all is like browsing in Lynx or using the command line in Terminal. While Twitter has certainly changed the way we’re blogging — from the long to the short form — if you set aside the hype, it’s not yet a platform of change. What Twitter has done is left the domain of the geeks faster than any other web technology I’ve seen and that’s a good thing. It works because it’s simple. That simplicity may also limit it’s usefulness beyond microblogging what you’re doing and reading the web in realtime.

Like sandals and pumps (designers/devs & marketing), there are all these rough apps out there now for Twitter: devs built them and marketing is selling them. And ya know, they’re pretty good for 1.0. I want to see Twitter 2.0.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the dreeping set on Flickr.

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Jun 01  |  Frank said:

It’s kind of like the 128k Mac, or iPhone 1.0: There’s something very cool here, even though you can easily see the rough edges: What do you mean, I can’t have folders? There’s no proper network access? I can’t IM on my phone?

But, just as Apple added levels of cognitive complexity (HFS, Multifinder, double scroll arrows) as the platform matured, so could Twitter gently increase the complexity to support things like private groups, message tagging or linking, official support for pics, audio and video, etc.

If Twitter chooses not to do this, I think we’ll see Twitter clones that “embrace and extend” the Twitter API to better provide for what users want to do. There’s literally ZERO switching cost, because most of the better Twitter clients let you use multiple accounts in parallel.


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