Comments on: I’ve joined the dark side

By: clarke

clarke — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:14:52 +0000

I completely agree with you Kevin. Twitter is a sad sad platform. 90% of the people using it are on their because they are pretentious pricks that think everyone should know what they just ate.

Of course the are all “tweeting” every second of their waking lives spamming about the most pointless things. They call it a platform for a social “conversation” when they should precede that term with “unintelligent”.

Stick to blogs if you think you have something to say people. Someone will find you if its relevant and intelligent. Don’t go seeking “followers” and attention by spending every waking hour online. Marketing people think Twitters some godly tool; If they are self-absorbed enough they can find other idiots with similar cock-eyed ways of thinking to do business with, or “learn” from.

These forum trolls have moved from their topics and into Twitter’s “tweets”. Enjoy a PR person’s dream and a, REAL, web developers worst nightmare. Keep on making my job irrelevant by thinking you know something about social networking through this tool. Twitter, and the people who worship it, make me sick!

~Let the flaming begin

By: cam

cam — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:17:10 +0000

I know: most likely. People tend to stick to what they’re familiar with unless there is a compelling feature.

Example: Hotmail. Webmail isn’t rocket science, and there are many, many, webmail services. Most people started with Hotmail or Yahoo mail. Google offers far and away a superior product with Gmail. Want to know who’s on top? Yahoo and Hotmail. Heck, you even still use Yahoo mail.

By: kev

kev — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:54:31 +0000

@cam,

While you do have a point, and I agree that it was a good idea, and they do have a large userbase, I still think they need to do more. Twitter was founded in 2006 and since then have added basically zero functionality that I know of. My argument isn’t that the idea is a bad one, but rather, it is easy to reproduce and improve upon.

Twitter has a giant presence right now, but if someone releases something with the exact same functionality but also includes a couple other awesome features, will twitter still hold the majority?

Who knows.

By: cam

cam — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:27:32 +0000

But will it really have the staying power once the initial novelty of the app wares off? Their functionality isn’t that hard to reproduce and improve upon…

Although I agree with you that Twitter is nothing special, I do have a bit of a problem with this statement.

Sure, Twitter isn’t that complicated to implement. However, I think it’s the novelty of the idea that is more important. I can think of many useful technologies that aren’t especially complicated or difficult to reproduce. What sets them apart was someone saw that that could be done. In fact, I would say that the most impressive technologies/apps are the ones that are simple and evoke that “Oh shit, that’s so obvious and awesome and yet I didn’t even see it” kind of feeling.