The Amazon Doctrine

I was watching the Amazon Kindle event as I was eating my breakfast, and aside from it being a great event, one thing in particular jumped out at me as pretty sound business advice, especially in today's world, where starting businesses without knowing how to make money from them seems to be the order of the day (and the perfect way to spot whether you should trust a service):

When did Amazon last make a move that screwed you over as a customer in the name of profit?

…

No, I can't think of anything either, because their profit is making you a happy consumer! How novel.

And while I do think Jeff Bezos is overplaying the competitiveness of the Kindle Fire versus the iPad (by a lot), at least I trust the company because I understand our relationship.

Some part of me can't help but admire the purity of the clusterfuck that is Twitter's continued downward trajectory from startup wunderkind to some sort of bland, wannabe ad-driven media company.

It's incomplete, but I can't help but draw comparisons between Twitter's alienation of their original users and ecosystem to, because I am me, Star Wars.

Despite what George Lucas says, the continuing alterations to Star Wars have been driven by business reasoning, not some artistic auteur need to see the vision completed. And in both cases, the original fan base is the one getting run over, while the unwashed masses get to enjoy Jar Jar and Justin Bieber, respectively.

Never mind the irony and complete lack of insight it takes to essentially lock out third-party developers — the very people who practically invented modern-day Twitter (thinking anything else is delusional).

Now Twitter considers its website the canonical Twitter. John Gruber recently asked an Apple representative about why clicking a Twitter notification sent you to the website rather than to the client app, and learned that Twitter had specifically requested that be the (unalterable) behavior. And now it's effectively getting rid of its desktop client.

I understand that Twitter wants to control the stream with regards to showing ads, and I can even understand why they clamp down on their API to safeguard their social graph from hostile takeovers. I get it.

But aside from the development cost of keeping a desktop client alive, something which they haven't given two shits about for years anyway, why not keep the client? They control its stream as much as anywhere else. It's completely in their control. Arguably more so than the website which given a touch of CSS is out of their control.

It may take years, but if it really is Twitter's intent to kill the desktop client, it will definitively mark the end of my use of the service. The API changes hurt me on principle, but killing the desktop clients actually hurts my practical use of Twitter as a service. Most days I'll have the client open on my secondary monitor and occasionally glance at the stream to see what's going on out in the world as I work. Contrast with Facebook, which I open maybe twice a day unless I specifically receive a notification.

Which do you think I interact with more often?

And despite their best engineering efforts, having to wait for the browser to load up Twitter.com will forever be considerably slower than the instant action of switching to the client. Never mind that I don't give a flying intercourse about 'Who to Follow' and 'Trending Topics' nonsense that is continually shoved down my throat. #foiegrasjokehere

I get the attempt to control the stream in an effort to monetize it. I get the need to control the third-party space from the risk of a 'trojan horse'-like hostile takeover.

I don't get how the desktop client can't be a part of that. I don't get how this will help the Justin Bieberification of Twitter. But most paradoxically, I don't understand why Twitter has started sending out "What's going on with your Twitter" emails when the whole fucking service is supposed to be about that!

In closing, Twitter, you have gone insane, and you should seek professional help.

PS: How are mentions and DMs read/unread status still not synced? How are billions of tweets every day without the capacity to to flip a fucking a bit? Man up.

Hunches and Hearsay

I agree with the point of Dustin Curtis's Black Widow:

Twitter was built on the backs of the very developers it is now blocking. It now expects those developers to continue supporting Twitter by syndicating content into its platform, but it no longer wants to provide any value to developers in return.

(Though, I would have ended on "to those developers in return", as Twitter seems more than happy to have three of the four infamous quadrants do their thing; you know, the ones where the users of Twitter are the product being sold?)

But I had to object against the initial argument that Twitter's social graph outshines Facebook's, which was the stepping stone Dustin uses to get to his conclusion. I took to Branch to talk with Dustin about this a bit, but would like to elaborate here, in proper form.

Twitter has an enormous advantage over Facebook in one key area: while people on Facebook tend to friend their friends, people on Twitter tend to follow their interests.

There are many people and brands that I identify with, like or lean towards that I don't follow on Twitter. Why? Because following them on Twitter means putting up with their Tweets. Some of them are simply obnoxious retweeters, some are just noisy or irrelevant to my interests on any given day. But in many cases I like your album, but don't care what you had for breakfast. And because Twitter has no tools for me to manage this, relationships on Twitter remain binary, you either follow, or you don't. Mentions and hashtags provide some semblance of an expanded relationship metric, but it's almost impossible to get intent from a mention. Did I agree with this person? If I did, am I more likely to subscribe to O Magazine?

Contrast with Facebook. They know your age, your marital status, your family, your friends, your high school, college, current and previous places of work, who you most interact with, which locations you've checked into and with who, as well as which people you generally appear in photos with. And they have Likes. Universally scorned by the technorati, the Like button is a veritable stroke of genius, as a fire-and-forget way of defining who you are to the people who follow you. Show me a single Firefly fan who hasn't liked Firefly on Facebook, or a single Apple fan who hasn't liked Apple. Likes are a way for people to define themselves, and as such they are perfect for refining a social graph (where refining means "monetize").

And what's more, Facebook provides users with tools to filter their stream. Don't like a person? Mute them. Don't like a brand? Mute it. It's exceptionally simple. You can Like a band, yet not have their crap fill your stream needlessly.

Dustin countered in our Branch discussion that:

I only have one counterpoint to your response, but it's a really big one: Facebook ads are terrible. Every report about them is negative. They have horrific click-through rates. On the other hand, I've heard that Twitter ads are extremely effective. What does that say about the respective graphs?

To which I replied

Well, it's hard to say what it says about the graphs. It might just as well say something about the complexity of Facebook's site vs the simplicity of a tweet stream. Or it might say something about the business intelligence team at Facebook vs the one at Twitter. Or the audience. It could be any number of things really.

More data is more data. What you do with that data, and who your advertisers are is as important as the kind of data you have access to. Personally I find that all ads are terrible, and I can't remember the last time I clicked one; but then again maybe our ilk are no longer a target audience worth bothering with?

In any case, if I may be so bold for a moment, I find the tendency to bolster arguments, ill-conceived or not, with unverified factoids a dangerous path to go down. Rumors mills abound in the tech world as it is, so when I see something like this:

This is why it has been shown that the vast majority of Twitter users who sign up never tweet, even though a huge number of those people view their feed often.

I instantly have my inner judge strike it from the record, because it amounts to nothing but hearsay. Where's the source? What's the evidence? I think it's right, but where the evidence to back it up? Twitter thinking of itself as a broadcast medium certainly rings true following their recent insanity. But asserting it — and this becomes more true the bigger your bullhorn is — without backing it up? No bueno.

A $50 Message

Maybe App.net will become something great, maybe it won't; I'm really fine either way. I don't want to leave Twitter as much as give it a wake up call, of the R. Lee Ermey variety.

For a company which has consistently reaped the benefits of its developer community to the extent as Twitter has, it seems completely ludicrous for it to then turn around and squash that self-same community without once thinking: "Hey, wait a minute, where is our innovation supposed to come from now?"

After all, while Twitter is filled to the brim with smart people, I can't quite figure out what they do. There have been great architecture improvements over the years; the fail whale is today an endangered species. But I don't mean to be an ass when I ask you to consider how rarely the desktop and iPad clients are updated, or when they last introduced a useful new feature…

The first desktop and mobile clients were third party, the @ mentions, the word 'tweet' was third party, #-tags and RT syntaxes were 'third party', search was bought from a third party if I'm not mistaken and the Twitter logo itself was first made for a third-party client!

If one were an ass, one might be tempted to ask if Twitter is even capable of innovation from inside its walls?

So I give my $50 to App.net not because I really want to use it over Twitter, but because I hope that it sends a message to a company which has completely lost its way.

Signed,
Michael Heilemann
Twitter User #11656

PS: How many hundreds of employees does it take to do something as stupidly simple as sync unread counts across clients?

#NewTwitter

Yes, it is a step up for power users, but I imagine it must be intimidating to n00bz and is a little too crowded for my tastes. But having finally spent some time with #NewTwitter, deeper problems make me think it got kicked out of the nest before its wings were fully formed.

Hotkeys

NewTwitter has shortcut keys for navigating the stream with j and k, as popularized by Google, but with two major problems. First of all, the selection background, #f4f4f4 on white... All but invisible on less than perfectly-contrasted displays.

But more importantly, the tweet you navigate to is not the same as the tweet you’ve selected! And other shortcut keys, like f for ‘favorite’, affect the actually selected tweet, rather than the one you’ve navigated to. Confused? You should be! There’s a reason nobody does it like this!

Aside from being confusing, it’s a hassle to use. While pruning my favorites, I often ended up unfavoriting tweets outside my browser frame, possibly losing favorites I would have preferred to keep. And for every tweet I wanted to interact with, I had to first press Enter, which feels absolutely counterintuitive when you come in from for instance Gmail or Google Reader.

Personally, I would yank the shortcut key support immediately and rebuild it from scratch.

New Tweets

The much neglected, yet still undefeated champion of Twitter on OS X, Tweetie for Mac, has an option, I believe it’s default, where new tweets are stacked on top of your current position. It’s fantastic as it allows you to leave Tweetie alone, and work your way up at your own convenience, never missing a tweet. You can also choose to auto-scroll, which is a great way of monitoring your stream as it’s happening.

When the ‘X New Tweets’ box appears, you click it and the tweets appear, pushing down existing ones. But they aren’t highlighted. So for anything above a handful, you have no way of knowing which are new. When possible, I like reading everything that comes through my stream, but when you come back to the client and the counter is well above a hundred; good luck finding where you left off.

PS: One way to circumvent this problem, is to click the first tweet in your stream, before loading in new ones, as a marker of your progress.

@Mentions

It’s a fundamental problem to the basic tenant that has elevated Twitter from obscure plaything to one of the primary communications channels of our lives, that all replies can’t be treated equally by the user.

Twitter is a two-way communications medium. That’s why it’s successful. You broadcast, they reply. Simple. But in actual fact, the way it goes is: you broadcast, the people you follow reply. And then someone else might also reply, but in Twitter-world, as decreed by the web and iOS app interfaces, replies do not mingle. They’re either from people you follow, showing up in your timeline, or not, showing up only under the @Mentions tab.

This makes sense if you’re more popular than you have time for, grumpy and/or very focussed, but if you turn it around and instead think of the timeline as your twitter timeline, then it only makes sense to allow for @mentions from people you don’t follow.

Aggravating the issue, the @Mentions tab in the web app doesn’t highlight when new mentions roll in, which I guesstimate converts into the majority of people using only the web app, not seeing any replies from people they don’t follow.

That cute guy/gal you met at SXSW, casually trying to get in touch through Twitter? Forget about it. The tweet from someone notifying you of a grievous error in your latest column? Won’t see it. Or more relevant, if you happen to publish a blog post that becomes very popular and people write to you on Twitter…

But here’s what really grinds my gears: @replies from the timeline do show up under @mentions. That makes some kind of sense. The problem is that for the most part you’ll first see those replies in your timeline, and then again when you next check @mentions. And apart from that redundancy, the two ‘unread’ indicators (where they exist, being absent as they are from the web app) don’t know that you’ve already read those same replies in your timeline, and gleefully light up when they @mentions is updated.

Also, just as a sidenote, replies aren’t highlighted in the timeline, nor are there any notifications for new direct messages.

AJAX

Since all internal Twitter links are AJAX-powered, they’ll actually break your browsers tabs. Just try opening someones profile with a middle- or CMD-click. For this crime alone!, I’ll leave the right-hand column empty.

Final Thoughts

It’s a step forward; nay, leap. Generally I do like it. But as they grew from oddity to industry behemoth, Twitter has become an indispensable part of many people’s lives, my own included. And because of that I’ve been baffled in the past by their reticence first towards GUI clients, and then towards their own web app. That seems to finally have broken, and while the iOS apps are by-and-large the best Twitter apps on those platforms — and beyond — the web app is in need of some fix-‘er-upping before it’s up to snuff.

That’s not to say that it isn’t a major improvement. And it’s great to see — wait for it — synergy between it and the iPad app interfaces. I can’t wait for it to mature.

I’d just kinda hoped that would have happened with this version.

The Twitter Comment System

Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.

Those days are gone, and a new batch have arrived, where if I write that I’m eating a strawberry pie on Facebook, it’ll get more replies than if I dig up a super-rare interview with George Lucas and write about it on my blog… What’s a man to do?

Adapt and overcome of course.

Earlier today I tweeted an idea as I was heading out the door and by the time I got back several people pointed me to Faruk’s, who already implemented an early version of that exact idea (so I’ll spare you the lead-in and leave you in his capable hands).

The basics is using Twitter for blog comments by using @Heilemann and a unique keyword, like the ID of the entry: #1234. As Twitter is searchable and tweets time-stamped, you have an off-site comment system already in use by millions.

Faruk’s current implementation is very baseline, but the potential is there, and it isn’t hard to imagine fetching replies through a twitter search, caching and displaying them as a traditional linear (maybe even threaded) comment list.

Problems and annoyances are abound, but it’s an intriguing idea; one that might be worth pursuing if it can bridge the classic and micro-blogging divide.

Hit me up and see what other said.

Update: There are several obvious and some not so obvious downsides to using Twitter as comment system, none of which I covered yesterday, both because I was pressed for time, but also because it’s worth gauging reactions rather than preempting them. First of all, Twitter searches only go back about 11 hours, which makes caching locally a must. Secondly, as roq points out, not everyone likes Twitter, though I can live with that (and easily build an anonymous function of sorts, if this otherwise solved more than it broke). Then there’s the 140-character limit, which isn’t necessarily conducive to conversation (but then, unlimited space apparently isn’t either, so…).

All in all, I doubt using twitter as a comment system is of much use. Perhaps it makes sense to have a link ala the one above to cater to people’s preferences, but on the other hand, if people aren’t going to comment locally, why would they do so on Twitter?

Update: Kim points out that “by anticipating the unique ids, it then becomes possible to pre-comment on stuff not yet published, and futurespam!” #

Aaaand We're Back. Again.

I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!

R+AV

Now, down to business.

I think I’ll try and upgrade BB to WP 2.6 one of the next few days, just to have the chance to play around with it properly, before finally taking the leap up to the just release Habari 0.5. I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to play around with it yet, but I’m so very proud to have been a part of that project so far. The work we’ve done these last few months is really something. There’s also a new project site, which is quite an improvement already.

So that’s coming along strong. I can’t wait to get it up and running on BB; I’m really just waiting for Chris to do the textile plugin he promised me… (nudge nudge, eh eh?).

Now, I’ve got some drafts for various entries I didn’t get to post over the last week, but now that the weather in Copenhagen has turned from LA to Seattle, what else is there to do but honker down and get some writing done?

Well, there’s watching movies, reading books and cooking food, but… Well, I’ll get them written, alright? I get enough whine from my friends about the activity-level on here already, so I guess I need to pick it up a bit, eh?

In the meanwhile, Steve Lam has been working quietly behind the scenes, and just released a new release candidate (haha… We just like the sound of it) of K2 yesterday, all 2.6 ready and everything. Knock yourself out!

And in closing: Twitter killed the blog. It’s true.

Ambient Intimacy

Rikke and I were heading for the subway in The Village, when we passed by two guys. The bespectacled one was asking his friend what he’d been up to before they met. Without hesitation, the other guy answered: “I was home, facebooking”.

Strangely enough, I too have been drawn into Facebooking, despite my preference against walled gardens. Hell, even Rikke is Facebooking!

It’s the phrase I’ve been wanting to spout at all of those internet-lethargic friends I have, but couldn’t conjure up on my own. Ambient Intimacy, (via Jeremy).

It’s an interesting development, and I’m sure it’s already been dissected to death in blogs across the globe. Yet it still tickles me how, much like The Sims, Facebook managed to tap into something so powerful, yet so absolutely misunderstood. I still don’t quite understand why anyone would want to play The Sims, but really, how can you argue with those kinds of sales?

What I do on the other hand understand, is ambient intimacy. I’m not the most social cat in town, and I downright suck at keeping contact with even the best of friends when life conspires against us spending ‘real’ time together. Sure, I have this blog, and people can read what I have to say about the things I deem ‘important’ enough to actually type up. And yeah, some of us have ‘secret’ blogs where we can write the same kind of ‘important’ things, only to a closed audience.

But the level of commitment needed to engage in that conversation is considerably higher than simply letting the world know how my MacBook Pro got doused with water yesterday evening. Or how it worked perfectly come morning (thanks Apple!). Hardly mission critical information, but relationships worth keeping usually survive on the details, not the broad strokes.

Facebook is about the two of us spending time together, without having to expend the effort to do so.

And considering the amount of people I know, whom I meet maybe once every other year, often less, you’d think Facebook (or Twitter, and last.fm, and flickr and so on) would be adopted faster than the you can take the ‘Guess a movie by its DVD cover’ quiz (47secs. 100%. Pwnage).

Contrary to what you might think, I also wonder whether Canada is run by Optimus Prime, and yeah, I do want to know which artists you’ve listened to the most over the last week. Similarly, you might want to know how our trip to New York was, without me specifically ringing your doorbell and spreading my celluloids across your dining room table.

Sure enough, some people simply aren’t geared towards trickling communication forms like Twitter, and as such I can do little else but lament the fact that the people I want to share my ambient intimacy with the most, are the tardiest in adopting these tools.