20130529

Ruminating on twitter

I recently got a twitter account.  I've only sent out a few tweets; I really wasn't planning on even getting an account.  I only got it because work wanted me to do some research on using Twitter's APIs to continuously process tweets to one or more accounts, and it turns out that you need an account even if you only want to write an app (even if the app doesn't require a user to login to their account).

So I'm not the best person to ask using twitter.  In fact, most of the info I get that comes from twitter (for instance, that Tortorella was booted as coach of the Rangers today) comes to me second-hand.  And I'm ok with that, honestly.

But I thought that Paul Graham's take on it was interesting.  It leads me to believe that twitter probably would be better being merely an internet RFC-based spec that wasn't owned by anyone.

And I think it also gets at why so many people were upset when Twitter decided to limit developers of 3rd party apps to 100k tokens (ie: market reach limit) a few months ago.  Everyone felt like it was an open party, and that was Twitter flexing their muscles as the provider, asserting that it is, in fact, closed.

I really don't have any big feelings on the token limit; I think it's a bad decision, and a terrible precedent, but it's unlikely to have any effect on me, since I don't use any 3rd party interface (even if I likely should).

In any event, I think it's an interesting way of looking at twitter, and I'll have to do more thinking about it.

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