It turns out the battle for control of Twitter rests almost exclusively in the unique value proposition of XMPP-served track. As Twitter strips away various features of its service to rebuild a scalable fail-whale -proof version, the one remaining hurdle is restoration of a fully-functional Track over IM.
For the last two weeks, a one-way IM service via Gchat inside Gmail or Gtalk standalone has provided a stream of tweets but not the previously enabled ability to post back to Twitter via the IM window. In addition, there is no support for the Track function, which interweaves Tweets from any endpoint on the Twitter network that correspond to the keywords you “track” on. Track was briefly available over SMS several weeks ago, but was then withdrawn.
TWITTERCRUNCH.COM is available! at godaddy
Looking forward to the restoration of two-way IM. Cool feature.
It also appears that Twitter is clearing out spammer accounts. lost about 11% of my followers today. when losing them in the past it has been one or two, not 13 or 14 in a day. Had some feedback from another Twitter user stating that they saw a similar occurrence.
The followers that are now presumably gone, generally follow 10 x more people than they have followers. Sometimes they follow 10,000 + people. At the same time they have a few hundred followers. On top of that they only have a few posts, usually containing a url to a site. Not sure if following that many people puts a lot of demand [stress] on Twitter but it probably will not hurt to remove these accounts.
What are your thoughts?
I’ve been wondering if what we are seeing from Twitter is actually a business move with technical issues as the cover. There has been mention that the full public timeline XMPP pub/sub functionality, when it returns, will not be the open service that it once was but one that will require a more established business deal with republishing restrictions. I’ve always wondered why they were making the full public timeline available as that is the basis of their lock-in. It would be just too easy for someone else to take over the conversations with stronger technology in an “embrace and extend” move.
What’s all this talk about Twitter Steve? I thought you were close to coming over to the dark side and joining us on FriendFeed.
http://friendfeed.com/e/9d8837.....-to-being/
Geoff
The basis of their lock-in is the assent of the users. Once the service is restored, they will have to move the slider somewhere between nothing and republishing to keep their developers and therefore their users. Track, however, is a service they completely control.
Thomas
I’ve been there all along. I just use Twitter as the input method.
Twitter and FriendFeed are both great, just keep going!
@4: Thomas Hawk, holy crap, you’re still relevant?
Twitter isn’t protecting anything. They’re just lazy, incompetent, or both.
Is TechCrunch just becoming link site to TechCrunch IT and other properties? Why don’t you publish entire article?
I wrote about this in my blog last May in a post called Pull Dressed as Push.
Twitter supports XMPP, with the low performance HTTP option, as described in their API documents. Thus you do have to poll Twitter to get data, which no doubt kills their server. Twitter should provide the high performance XMPP option and they may be doing it for their special friends. At least that is what I would do if I were in their shoes.
I don’t understand why someone else couldn’t use the Twitter API to grab all of the public timeline and be an intermediary between Twitter users and Twitter for track purposes.
Time to enjoy burning Twitter investor money. That’s all VC money about.
I love how Gillmor deletes comments.
I second #13. I called out Gillmor on using wording that borders on being technically incorrect, and using too much jargon to appeal to a sense of authority.
Gillmor deleting comments that are a) grammatically correct b) not link-spam c) thoughtful (even if in a critical-of-Gillmor way), to me, is against the very spirit on which TechCrunch was founded.
Mike, are you listening? Why doesn’t Gillmor follow by your example? I’ve seen dozens of times when you were criticized (mostly wrongly), and you never deleted comments (to my knowledge), and always took the high ground to explain your stance instead. In my opinion, that’s largely what accounts for TC’s dominant position today.
Why isn’t Steve required to abide by the same rules? How about leaving critical comments intact, and either a) ignoring them or b) taking the high ground with a thoughtful (or at bare minimum dismissive) stance?
Twitter is now becoming a huge turn off…people are now switching over to other options like freindfeeds, plurk, etc.
indeed plurk is catching on and is now my favorite.
Even the one-way IM is no good. Previously, if I *was not* online on my IM it would go to my SMS, and would only go to IM if I *was* online. Now, if I enable IM, it goes only to IM - even if I’m not online - and so I miss stuff and get it all at once later. Not the desired behaviour at all.
This is strange right?