Dave Winer’s TwitterGram
Michael Arrington
22 comments »
Dave Winer likes to throw web services and his own software in a blender and see what comes out, and his new TwitterGram project is a perfect example. In this case, he’s married the Twitter API to his own service that allows people to upload short audio messages to their Twitter accounts. He’s then taken the next step of allowing people to phone in their messages via BlogTalkRadio. The result is a super easy way to post audio messages to your Twitter account via a phone.
Like most of Dave’s projects, there’s no obvious business purpose to the service, and he seems to be creating something new and useful for the sole purpose of keeping his mind busy. Not all of his projects take off, but they are always interesting and fun to explore.
And don’t mis-underestimate him, either. He’s made plenty of money along the way while helping the Internet ecosystem. I wonder what he’ll blend up next.
There may not be a business purpose - but eventually, somewhere, somehow someone will build upon a good creative idea and make a business case for it.
To me this seems very interesting and maybe down there could be a business purpose for it. I wonder what is going to come next from him.
Watching Scoble and Winer twittergram each other is pretty damn interesting. Personally, I think they are actually script-bots that are embedded in the twitter code. Oh and for the record, Scoble is a twitter / pwnce friend p i m p
800+ friends on pownce in what 10 days. damn this stuff spreads like wildfire. sizzlin hot !web2.0 tech. finally something new and shiny…
“And don’t mis-underestimate him, either. He’s made plenty of money along the way while helping the Internet ecosystem.”
I depreend from this that, in your opinion, money is the way to determine someone’s value, right? If Dave had done exactly the same things but not making any money along the way… people would underestimate him. Nice.
This really aches to have something like Odeo Studio tied on to it, so you can just record with a small Flash animation. It’s easyish to throw together if you don’t mind paying several grand for the codec so you can convert Flash recordings to MP3
Of course, once you’ve done that, video becomes easy too, and Twitter can turn into current.tv.
Further, I’m pretty surprised Twitter themselves haven’t been really on the ball about this and rolled out simple recording tools for it.. especially considering they had all the technology from Odeo already
I was waiting for them to announce something, but it seems like they’re either happy to let everyone else make value on their service, or they’ll announce it all later on and annoy the ecosystem.
Michael, thanks for the mention.
I am pleased that Blogtalkradio was able to contribute to Dave’s cool Twittergram creation. I look forward to seeing where Dave wants to take this neat tool and we stand ready to help in any way we can.
Alan Levy
CEO BTR
Wouldn’t it be de-impossible to mis-underestimate him since mis-underestimate is not a word?
> Like most of Dave’s projects, there’s no obvious business purpose to the service,
Really? That’s not the way I see it from my East Coast lense.
It seems to me that we have seen this same ping server (coral reef .. hehe) architecture rollout/play/sell before. Same bartender and blender … just some slightly different ingredients.
First, no one can deny that Dave’s overall technical concept is a valid one. But in reality right now it is just technology that needs much help to get traction. Actually, right now there are more people talking and writing about “twittergrams” on the web then there are people actually posting twittergrams on the web. Step 1 accomplished!!
If his implementation rollout begins to stick, which I believe with some tweaking, marketing, uptake and valley help and luck could, watch how the Twitter technical connection/pinging becomes less important.
Dave’s new site could become the main or at least one of the main community ping servers of value in the audiogramosphere or better yet mediagramosphere.
This play is really not much different then his weblogs.com play. Get in early on the buildout of the core communication architecture and have other deep pocketed valley ventured developers build off of you. Every new venture that attaches to your service validates your implementation and adds value $$ to your property.
Like Twitter on the SMS text side, if some audio/video/media developers become interested in Twitter they will logically think they need to build out their media grammys from Dave’s new Twitter audiogram coral reef alias ping server.
Anything here sound familiar…
So what is the business purpose of and the reason somebody would buy twittergram.com in the future??
The same reason Verisign bought weblogs.com:
Michael Arrington - October 7th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
“Anjo,
Ping servers are critical for the proper working of blogs. They are the way that real time search engines like technorati, pubsub, icerocket, etc. know a blog has updated. Without ping servers, the search engines would have to index every blog every few minutes to keep content updated. With ping servers, the blog tells the search engines that it has updated, and the search engines can therefore only re index updated blogs.”
Michael Arrington -
October 7th, 2005 at 5:12 pm
“Randy, yeah, there are many ping servers today, but weblogs is the oldest and is built into everything. For instance, I only ping weblogs.com because I know that’s enough to get the word out to all ping servers.”
Seems so obvious from here. I wrote about this angle about two weeks ago in a post “Mr. Twitter meets Mr. Podcast” @ http://www.podcastbrowser.com/blog/?p=325
Harold Gilchrist
My name says it all.
All of you are in la-la land. This is DOA just like Pownce. Totally worthless. These don’t improve anyone’s lives.
“Mis-underestimate” isn’t a word.
Wouldn’t “mis-underestimating him” mean to overestimate him? I don’t think you meant that. Or is this about TechCruch 20’s controversial
“Miss Under Estimate contest?
That sounds like a pretty cool service.
This new era of mashups and “blending” is great, allowing individuals to customize large companies data in ways that would never make sense for the company itself to do (b/c it is for a niche).
Also check TwitterMail.com for sending out Twitters via mail if you don’t want to record voice…
Michael,
While it may not be seen as a traditional ‘business purpose’, please know that our agency is actively taking advantage of Twitter, as well as the Twittergram service that Dave and Alan have so graciously offered.
Together, they are allowing us to help people in Los Angeles and far beyond lead safer, healthier and more productive lives - and we welcome TechCrunch readers to help us think of ways to make it even better.
I offer a tip o’ the helmet to Dave, and *especially* Alan Levy, who has not only believed but actively supported one of our most promising web2.0 endeavors, which will hopefully soon be resurrected and taken to the next level.
In fact, our next BlogTalk Radio show will be exclusively to discuss suggestions for on-line offerings, and we dare people to help us dream big.
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,
Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Service Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department
With the huge success of Twitter and its upgrade TwitterGram one has to believe there is a market out there for people who just want to know what other people are doing right now. Then why not take the idea a little further and create a service called ‘Follow me around’. The objective here is to provide a life stream (and archive service) of websites, online content and news being gathered by people. I can see people reading Seth Godin’s Blog using this to see how Seth gets those brilliant ideas!