A gave this presentation at Twitter Developer Nest (#devnest) last night in Brighton, UK (12th Oct).
I discussed what Twitter is doing about entering the ‘mainstream’ and the implications these changes have for developers and business owners working on the platform.
I intend to break these topics down into a series of short blog posts, so check back for more. In the mean time, see below for the slides; minus my scintillating commentary.
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Yesterday I posted a hack which adds an old style RT button to the new Twitter website. Here’s the full post on what it is, and why I did it.
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For whatever reason, it’s clear that Twitter want you to use ‘new’ style retweets. They are better for analytics and data-mining, and lower the barriers to participation for unseasoned users.
However, if you’re like me and prefer old school retweets you may be annoyed that the so-called #NewTwitter makes this rather hard. If you want to quote someone’s tweet and add your own anecdote, you’ll have to copy and paste the tweet and then type out the “RT @username” part. It annoyed me enough to make a JavaScript bookmarklet to solve the problem.
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Direct messaging is one of Twitter’s weakest features. On a platform that is fundamentally about public conversation, this is a one-to-one private messaging system – except it isn’t private – it’s just direct. The new Twitter has improved the messaging interface, but this is only superficial improvement; DMs are a flawed feature at a much lower level.
In descending order of interestingness and importance, here are a few things you may not know about Twitter DMs.
- All third party applications you authorize can read your DMs *
- Deleting a DM you’ve sent or received also deletes it from the other person’s account;
- Deleting DMs sends some Twitter clients into a confused frenzy;
- DMs don’t have a ‘reply to’ ID, so they can’t be threaded properly;
- The new Twitter interface only loads your most recent 100 messages;
- I’ve written a tool for backing up and deleting all your DMs – imaginatively titled DM Cleaner.
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Last night Twitter announced a new version of their main website, quickly dubbed #NewTwitter.
I’ve not seen the interface first hand as yet, it will be rolled out over the usual undefined period of time. As with previous features, such as “who to follow”, it may even flick on and off – who knows. There are a number of features I’m curious to see, such as whether they’ve added full geo support, i.e. adding of ‘places’.
But I digress; these new features and all the whooping over slick new interfaces are not what this post is about. What interests me is what Twitter are doing with their brand, how it affects the developer ecosystem and why the hell anyone would attempt to base a business on the Twitter platform.