Drew Olanoff suggests that Twitter could extend the hashtag idea to make “bits and pieces of data clickable.” I’m not a fan of Twitter these days, but I love the idea of incorporating data structure into online content through simple affordances. Ah, so that’s Twitter’s strategy: A “clickable” world – The Next Web: #
“By structuring data, Twitter could make its network of information easier to navigate and discover upon. It would also help the company structure its API so that third-party developers wouldn’t have to dig through every single tweet for particular information. I can click or tap around Wikipedia for hours, since everything is linked by its editors. Twitter could engage users in the same way.” ##
What turned you off Twitter?
PS: Do you know how many sites you exist on around the interweb? I was trying to cite you as an example of someone who manages to keep blogging interesting things, and couldn’t quite figure out which site I should link.
I think what turned me off Twitter mostly is the fact that they have such a narrow vision for what their company can be, and that their vision doesn’t support my preferred use of their service.
Twitter is turning away from being an ecosystem that supported lots of 3rd-party developers and novel use cases, and becoming a very closed system. They’re turning into a publishing system that’s more focused on selling access to advertisers than providing a democratic platform for communication. Which is their right, of course. I just choose to opt out of that kind of service.
Alpha.App.Net (ADN) is taking a very different approach to building a very similar service. ADN lets me pay for their service up front and it actively supports a 3rd-party developer ecosystem. To me, there’s much more potential for cool stuff to happen at ADN, and there are certainly interesting people to follow there and interesting conversations happening. So, I reward ADN with my money and attention and I remain a very passive and occasional observer of Twitter.
As for your postscript… oh, yeah. I am painfully aware of how scattered my online presence has become. Frankly, I’m amazed you found this site. 🙂
I’ve been trying to regain some focus lately, and I’ve settled on this site for information management-related stuff and stumax.com for personal stuff, and I’m getting around to shutting down the other sites that I’ve abandoned over the years. I always loved the creative and technical challenge of setting up a new WordPress site, which is why I started so many of them. But now I want to focus more on content than presentation. After all, what good is having a snazzy-looking blog if you never fill it with anything interesting?