Monthly Archive for April, 2010

Maybe if I just restart the blog quietly like this, nobody will notice how long it has been since I last posted here.

Let’s start talking a bit about Twitter. This week the first Twitter developers’ conference, oh so cutely named Chirp, is being held in San Francisco. It has been a long time in coming and it’s not a moment too soon. What with the purchase of Tweetie, lots of talk about “filling the holes”, the semi-officialization of Twitter’s client for the Blackberry, the launch of @anywhere and (drumroll) the announcement of  the promoted tweets program, a public discussion between Twitter and its developer community is long overdue. And this somewhat shaken band of ecosystem dwellers figured that the time was also ripe for an informal convention among themselves.

I’m still digesting all that is coming out of Chirp, and it’s not over yet, but I have to admit being positively impressed with the way Twitter The Company seems to have grown up. I’m especially (and surprisingly), impressed with the promoted tweets concept although I, like everyone else, am anxious to see how it works (or doesn’t) in the wild and at scale.

I say surprisingly because I am actually very critical of many of Twitter’s weaknesses, leaving me extremely cynical about all that do-no-evil-style chatter and professed openness.

I get that it is a company, that Twitter has taken money from investors and promised to grow the company fast enough to pay these people back in a reasonable time frame. So they have every right to keep certain things under their hats.

But the natural evolution of Twitter, and the proof of an open system, would be opening up the protocol like in the world of blogs or email or Jabber… all you should have to do is point the client of your choice at the stream and, voilà, bye bye single point of failure.