Tag Archives: Twitter

Whither the Facebook Purge?

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The other day, a bout of online drama made me won­der if it wouldn’t be a good idea to make my online activ­i­ties a lit­tle more pri­vate — hide my Twit­ter feed, for exam­ple, and maybe un-friend some peo­ple on Face­book to restrict it to just my “core” friends.

Facebook Friends List

Do I actu­ally want to know what 281 peo­ple are doing?

But in doing so, I thought for prob­a­bly the first time about the direc­tion Face­book has taken with regards to friend­ships and view­ing friends’ updates.

Firstly, unlike Twit­ter, when some­one you know “friends” you on Face­book, the socially accept­able thing to do is to accept.  Rather than say­ing “it’s great that you’re inter­ested in me, but I’m not as inter­ested in you, so I won’t ‘fol­low’ you back,” Face­book man­dates a two-way inter­est.  So if some­one “friends” you, you either have to ignore them (and feel slightly guilty about it) or com­mit your­self to see­ing their updates.

Sec­ondly, Face­book is becom­ing less of a place to catch up with friends, and more of an iden­tity ser­vice (which has been accel­er­ated with the new Time­line pro­files).  Your Face­book pro­file defines you; tells oth­ers who you are and who you know.  This adds to the impe­tus to “friend” peo­ple you don’t really care about that much — you’re not so much express­ing an inter­est in another per­son as defin­ing who you are.  And that, of course, also lum­bers you with look­ing at their updates all the time.

It’s obvi­ous that this is a com­mon issue, and rather than backpedal or restrict the way Face­book wants to take its ser­vice, their response has been to add com­plex fil­ter­ing options that let you block spe­cific users and apps, view only updates from var­i­ous groups, and recently, adding an auto­mated fil­ter that tries to guess which updates you’ll want to see.

Per­son­ally, I pre­fer using Face­book via the API (using Suc­cess­Whale) which avoids the auto­mated fil­ter, but I must still block the updates of peo­ple I don’t care much about man­u­ally.  I’d quite like to cull my Face­book friends list down to just those whose updates I actu­ally care about.  But is doing so a rea­son­able way of reduc­ing my infor­ma­tion over­load — or will­ingly dam­ag­ing an iden­tity that I spent the last four years try­ing to curate?

Announcing: SuccessWhale version 2.0!

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Ladies and Gen­tle­men of the Inter­net, I am pleased to announce that Suc­cess­Whale ver­sion 2.0 has just been released and is now live on SuccessWhale.com.

Suc­cess­Whale is a web-based client for Twit­ter and Face­book, writ­ten in PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. It offers a multi-column view that allows users to merge together infor­ma­tion from all their con­nected accounts and view it at a glance from any web browser.

The big changes between ver­sion 1.1.2 and 2.0 are:

  • Face­book support
  • Sup­port for mul­ti­ple Twit­ter (and Face­book) accounts
  • As many columns as you want
  • Columns that com­bine mul­ti­ple feeds
  • Light­boxed images from Twit­pic and yFrog
  • New themes
  • Numer­ous bug fixes!

You can see a screen­shot of it in action below:

SuccessWhale Screenshot

I would par­tic­u­larly like to thank Alex Hut­ter, Hugo Day, Erica Ren­ton and Rg Enzon, whose help in find­ing bugs and sug­gest­ing new fea­tures has been instru­men­tal in bring­ing Suc­cess­Whale up to ver­sion 2.0 today.

Suc­cess­Whale is an open source project, and the source code is licenced under the GPL v3.

Could I Live Without…?

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A cou­ple of months ago, I was par­tic­u­larly scathing about the crop of Face­book games that I was play­ing, par­tic­u­larly ones that had no end. The result? I no longer play any games on Face­book what­so­ever. As I bemoaned at length, not one of them was adding to my life in any appre­cia­ble way.

I won­der if it is now a good time to apply the same logic to var­i­ous online ser­vices — to be extremely crit­i­cal of them, to dis­cover whether or not they actu­ally add any value to my life. In short, could I live without…

 

1. A Google Account

As a search engine, Google is almost essen­tial to life on the inter­net today.  Like a lot of you, I have signed up to many Google ser­vices over the years, each one sim­ply on the merit that it was bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion (if there even was com­pe­ti­tion).  I go through phases of being alarmed at the amount of data Google col­lates about us all — their “do no evil” pol­icy is wear­ing thin in the eyes of their cus­tomers.  But could I man­age with­out mail, cal­en­dars and con­tacts syn­chro­nised between my phone and the web?  With­out the near-endless enter­tain­ment of Google Reader?  With­out the Android Market?

Although I resent Google’s domin­ion over my online exis­tence, its offer­ings are just bet­ter than oth­ers’.  And hav­ing an Android phone seals the deal.

Ver­dict: No.

 

2. GMail

If I can’t live with­out a Google account, maybe I should just dump the GMail part of it?  I’ve actu­ally done this once before; moved my e-mail whole­sale to my own server.  But I went back — it’s a nice feel­ing to be in charge, to have your own mail server, but every­thing was so much harder.  “Archiv­ing” and “tag­ging” become a multi-click ‘move’ oper­a­tion, IMAP has a host of strange issues, and no web­mail client is a patch on Google’s.

Ditch­ing GMail appeals, but two months down the line I’d prob­a­bly spend another evening mov­ing every­thing back again.

Ver­dict: Prob­a­bly not.

 

3. Twit­ter

I sus­pect I’m in the minor­ity, in that I fol­low no celebri­ties and don’t use Twit­ter for any­thing to do with “brand aware­ness” or “cus­tomer inter­ac­tion”.  I use it for talk­ing to my friends.  There are sim­ply too many of us, online too irreg­u­larly, to use instant mes­sag­ing — or god for­bid, phone calls — any more.  (Whether that says some­thing about the qual­ity of our inter­ac­tion, I’m not sure.)  But with­out Twit­ter I’d be largely unaware of what’s going on in the lives of the dozen or so peo­ple I care about the most.  Though my posts may be triv­ial and of inter­est to few, los­ing Twit­ter would be close to los­ing friends.

Ver­dict: No.

 

4. Face­book

The social net­work we love to hate, there are a whole host of rea­sons peo­ple would want to quit — dis­re­gard for pri­vacy, end­less Far­mville spam, lack of trans­parency / import & export func­tions — but yet, so few do.  I don’t play games on Face­book, I rarely post pho­tos, I don’t “like” pages or take quizzes.  I have around 300 “friends”, many of whom I haven’t seen since school and wouldn’t recog­nise in the street.

But there’s a few close friends and fam­ily that don’t use Twit­ter, and clos­ing my Face­book account would mean cut­ting them off.  And besides, there’s always that nag­ging thought: “you’re 26 years old, every 26-year-old is on Facebook!”

Ver­dict: It’s tempt­ing to try.

 

5. Google+

Like many geeks, I am an “early adopter” of Google+, a social net­work that’s still in beta.  Now and again I load the page or run the mobile app, to see what peo­ple have posted — and they’ve posted exactly the same as they posted on Twit­ter.  Plus, with­out an API, I never bother to man­u­ally copy my own Twit­ter and Face­book posts to G+ too.

It’s nice to be in there in case it picks up and becomes the next Social Net­work to Rule them All.  But right now, it’s tak­ing up brain power and space on my book­marks tool­bar, and I’m gain­ing noth­ing from it.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

6. Live­Jour­nal

All my Live­Jour­nal posts are already syn­di­cated from my blog, and I go through phases of dis­abling com­ments on my LJ posts to drag peo­ple to com­ment on the blog itself.  It rarely works, but I have so lit­tle inter­ac­tion with peo­ple through Live­Jour­nal these days that it barely mat­ters.  Live­Jour­nal is dying, at least from my per­spec­tive, and I have already declared it time to quit.  Per­haps now is the time.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

7. DeviantArt

Once upon a time, I posted sto­ries here with reg­u­lar­ity.  Now, it’s a place I visit daily on the off-chance that one of the cou­ple of artists whose pic­tures I enjoy has posted some­thing.  Usu­ally, they havent.  This is what RSS was made for.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

8. Flickr

Though firmly an ama­teur, I’m proud of my pho­tos and Flickr is where I choose to show them off.  It’s also where fam­ily mem­bers abroad go to see what we’re up to, and it’s my insur­ance against a hard disk crash eras­ing the bits and bytes of our mem­o­ries.  Just as with GMail, there’s a strong temp­ta­tion to move my pic­tures to my own server, and run my own image gallery — but Flickr just does it bet­ter.

Ver­dict: No.

 

9. Last.fm

I’ve been a keen scrob­bler since the days when peo­ple knew what “scrob­ble” meant, and it’s so easy to set up that I’ve always set it up on any new com­puter, oper­at­ing sys­tem or media player.  But why?  I know what my taste in music is, and I have lit­tle inter­est in my own lis­ten­ing his­tory.  My friends surely have even less.  The only rea­son I can see for con­tin­u­ing is that I’m proud of the amount of data I’ve gen­er­ated already — and that’s no rea­son at all for car­ry­ing on.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

10. Foursquare

In using Foursquare, I may be just as much a vic­tim of the sunk cost fal­lacy as I was in all those Face­book games.  I’ve now been “play­ing” for so long that I’ve stopped car­ing about beat­ing my friends; stopped car­ing how far away the next wall-chart sticker might be.  Check­ing in is just some­thing I do when I arrive at a place.  I’m now essen­tially get­ting noth­ing out of Foursquare, even though I’m still reli­ably giv­ing the com­pany and its affil­i­ates a com­plete his­tory of where I go and where I shop.

Ver­dict: Hell yes, ditch this yesterday.

 

What are your thoughts on my rea­son­ing?  Which ser­vices are you tied to, and which are you con­sid­er­ing leav­ing for good?  I’d be inter­ested to know.

A Place for Google Plus?

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“Google+”, Google’s new stab at social net­work­ing, is doing the rounds of tech news sites today. So what’s it like — if you scored an invite, should you be using it, and if you haven’t yet, are you miss­ing out?

If you’ve used Face­book — and let’s face it, you have — Google+‘s inter­face will be imme­di­ately intu­itive. A long feed of sta­tuses and shared links, the abil­ity to com­ment, re-share and “+1″ (i.e. like). It does pho­tos and videos, inte­grat­ing with Picasa. It does check-ins, inte­grat­ing with Lat­i­tude. It does text and video chat, inte­grat­ing with Google Talk. You’re prob­a­bly not sur­prised by any of this.

It’s most un-Facebook-like fea­ture is its “Cir­cles” — groups of peo­ple that you can share with eas­ily. This is pos­si­ble with Face­book groups, but there it’s the excep­tion rather than the rule. Google clearly intends for your Cir­cles to define the way you share, chat, and use Google+.

Google+ Circles Manager

Google+ Cir­cles Manager

If this is sound­ing a lot like Dias­pora to you, well… it is. Aside from the dis­trib­uted nature of Dias­pora, it’s vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal — includ­ing the slow invite pro­ce­dure that causes it to be a vir­tual ghost town at the moment. Only time will tell if it suf­fers from the same prob­lem, the root cause of which being that it is not the world’s first social network.

It has some great ideas, and if nobody were mem­bers of Twit­ter or Face­book already, it would be easy to say “yeah, this is great, let’s all use this”. But Google+ requires effort — time taken to invite friends, curate your groups, set up shar­ing pref­er­ences. It’s a rea­son­able amount of effort to invest for peo­ple that aren’t sure if their friends are going to use it too.

But the biggest, most impor­tant issue is that it doesn’t, at present, inte­grate. With any­thing. Now it is still under heavy devel­op­ment; I’m sure inte­grat­ing with other ser­vices will come soon. But right now, it doesn’t talk to Twit­ter. It doesn’t talk to Face­book. It doesn’t have a pub­lic API to talk to third-party apps. I, and many other users, are so heav­ily invested in Twit­ter and Face­book that the tran­si­tion to Google+ has to be seam­less — it has to work along­side the other net­works, with­out any extra effort, oth­er­wise it’s just not worth the bother.

To make the point, this is how the net­works and apps that I cur­rently use inter­act: (yes, I was that bored)

Graph of my interaction with Social Networks

Graph of my inter­ac­tion with Social Networks

There’s not space on there for some­thing that accepts sta­tus updates, unless it’s sup­ported by Suc­cess­Whale or Tweet­Deck. There’s no space for some­thing that accepts check-ins, unless it syncs with Foursquare. No space for any­thing to use my pic­tures unless it can get them itself from Flickr. No space for another chat sys­tem unless I can use it from Pid­gin or Skype.

I don’t mean to be neg­a­tive to Google+ — it’s a good ser­vice which I’m sure, given time, will become great. One day it may be the new Face­book, a social net­work­ing behe­moth that all oth­ers aim for and com­pare them­selves to. And it actu­ally cares some­what about pri­vacy (for now), which would in my opin­ion make it a prefer­able king of the social net­works. Its UI is great; com­bin­ing Google’s char­ac­ter­is­tic min­i­mal­ism with some actual great design rather than just util­i­tar­ian blocks of colour.

Google+ for Android - Main FeedGoogle+ for Android - Friends & Circles

But for $deity’s sake, Google, give this thing a pub­lic API. As Twit­ter realised five years ago, the API is as impor­tant as — if not more impor­tant than — the ser­vice itself. Let us mix it up in weird and won­der­ful ways with the ser­vices we’re already using, and Google+ will instantly lose most of its bar­rier to entry.

Twitter, Facebook and the Expectation of Privacy

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I’ve been asked a cou­ple of times why it is that my sta­tus posts on Face­book are locked down, vis­i­ble only to friends or some­times friends-of-friends:

Facebook post

…but yet with the same button-click that I post to Face­book, I post exactly the same thing, pub­licly, on Twitter:

Twitter post

Surely that’s undo­ing all the good of my Face­book pri­vacy settings?

The rea­son is because I’m not doing it for rea­sons of my pri­vacy — I’m doing it for yours, and what your expec­ta­tions of pri­vacy might be.

On Twit­ter, a reply to me is a first-class cit­i­zen — a tweet in its own right. It has a ‘reply ID’ field to help thread con­ver­sa­tions, and it men­tions my han­dle using the ‘@’ con­ven­tion, but oth­er­wise it is a tweet like any other. You, the replier, have one sim­ple pri­vacy set­ting — is your account pub­lic or pri­vate? Can the world see your tweets (includ­ing that reply) or just the peo­ple you allow?

By con­trast, on Face­book, a com­ment is a second-class cit­i­zen — a child of the orig­i­nal post. Implicit in this is that it inher­its the orig­i­nal post’s pri­vacy set­tings. As the com­menter, you do not have con­trol over who sees what you write. Assum­ing — as most have — that the orig­i­nal poster has accepted the default pri­vacy options, the com­menter has only one choice: either allow their reply to be pub­lic and search­able for the entire inter­net, or don’t reply.

On Face­book there’s no way I can let you set who can see your com­ments, so I do the best thing I can: make your com­ments vis­i­ble only to the 300 or so peo­ple who I am rea­son­ably sure are not evil. If you like, you can check the list and see if you object to any­body on it.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can do to respect com­menters’ pri­vacy on a ser­vice that itself respects pri­vacy only grudgingly.

SuccessWhale: Considering the Reply UI

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What was once my sim­ple Twit­ter client, Suc­cess­Whale, is under­go­ing a lot of changes in the build-up to ver­sion 2. One of the biggest changes is the sup­port for mul­ti­ple ser­vices, of which Face­book is the first to be inte­grated. This, com­bined with the Twit­ter website’s new design, brings into ques­tion SuccessWhale’s “reply” UI.

There’s no ques­tion that there should be a big “type your sta­tus update here” box at the top. Both incar­na­tions of Twit­ter do this, Face­book does this, every non-mobile client (and a few mobile ones too) does it. It’s what users expect, and I see no rea­son not to stick with it.

About a thou­sand years of inter­net time ago (2010), reply­ing to a tweet from Twitter’s web­site re-used that top sta­tus box for the reply. The user clicked the “reply” but­ton, and the sta­tus box got pre-filled with “@” plus the user­name of the per­son they were reply­ing to. It looked like this:

Old Twitter Reply UI

Suc­cess­Whale, then solely a Twit­ter client, copied this behav­ior. Its reply UI involved click­ing a “reply” but­ton and hav­ing its main “pub­lish sta­tus update” box update with the replied-to user’s name, like this:

SuccessWhale version 1 Reply UI

Now Suc­cess­Whale is attempt­ing to be a Face­book client, too. On Twit­ter, replies to a sta­tus update are given vir­tu­ally the same promi­nence as the orig­i­nal sta­tus. On Face­book how­ever, posts are more thread-based, with com­ments on a sta­tus update clearly being daugh­ter objects of the orig­i­nal update. Sta­tus updates them­selves use “newest at the top” order, just like Twit­ter, but com­ments on an update are “newest at the bot­tom”. So on Face­book, it makes sense for the “reply” field to be inline, like this:

Facebook Reply UI

In play­ing around with the UI for Suc­cess­Whale ver­sion 2, I intro­duced an inline reply box, which works some­thing like this:

Successwhale version 2 Prototype Reply UI

A third reply UI was intro­duced with the new Twit­ter web­site — a float­ing “lightbox”-style reply area which appears when the “reply” but­ton is clicked. Like this:

New Twitter Reply UI

So, between the two sites that Suc­cess­Whale cur­rently talks to, we have three UI par­a­digms for reply­ing to a sta­tus update. I feel it is very impor­tant for Suc­cess­Whale to have a con­sis­tent UI for reply­ing, par­tic­u­larly when we intro­duce columns that mix updates from Twit­ter, Face­book and poten­tially other sources.

So, my ques­tion to Suc­cess­Whale users is: which one do you like best? I have no par­tic­u­lar attach­ment to any of them, so let’s get our democ­racy on. Your choice is between:

  1. Using the main sta­tus update box (like Suc­cess­Whale ver­sion 1 and old Twitter)
  2. Using an inline box (like Facebook)
  3. Using a pop-up ‘light­box’ (like new Twitter)

The com­ments are yours, vote away!

The Pulse

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Another after­noon of high-volume Pen­du­lum and high-caffeine brain, blaz­ing through work on one screen while flick­ing my atten­tion over two oth­ers. Two news pages and four Twit­ter lists are open, poised. They all refresh auto­mat­i­cally, but each time my eyes focus on them I reach for the man­ual refresh but­ton purely on instinct.

It’s a con­stant stream of news that’s in real terms utterly use­less to me. I’ve never been to Egypt and I don’t know any­one there. I don’t know a lot about Mubarak’s regime or any of the alter­na­tives. In a world with­out the inter­net, maybe I’d buy a paper tomor­row and read about it with mild inter­est. But the inter­net itself, and the real-time access it brings, can ele­vate any topic to the point of obsession.

Some­thing big is going down in a coun­try thou­sands of miles away, in a coun­try where everyone’s phones are offline, inter­net access has been cut, and news agen­cies’ cam­eras have been con­vis­cated. But still the news comes. Phone calls trans­lated into tweets, live blogs pushed byte by byte over satel­lite modems, hand­held cam­corders stand­ing in for the lost news cameras.

The imme­di­acy of it, the raw trans­port of infor­ma­tion from real­ity to text and video, the process itself kicks off a lit­tle spark of adren­a­line, induc­ing a stress response, refresh, refresh, refresh until the source stops broad­cast­ing, then find a new one. Never stop. Dis­con­nec­tion is death.

The white-hot pulse of news flashes upwards from Tahrir Square out to low-earth orbit, back to the sur­face, across mil­lions of spi­der­web miles of cable and straight into my forebrain.

The real world feels so slow some­times. It can be min­utes between tweets.

It’s a con­ti­nent away and it doesn’t affect my life at all. But I don’t want to be a day late read­ing the news — I don’t want to be 30 sec­onds late.

Each day I carry around a plethora of devices that let me avoid that hor­ri­ble late­ness; allow me to find the pulse from wher­ever in the world it starts and catch it before it’s had a minute to grow cold. One day, we will be able to catch that pulse and ride it with a mere thought — and for me, that day can’t come soon enough.

For the Discerning Lady or Gentleman, SuccessWhale version 1.1

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The sud­den pro­lif­er­a­tion of peo­ples’ syn­di­cated tweets from sources such as Foursquare and Fallen Lon­don annoys me far more than it should. Any more sen­si­ble old grouch would pick up his pipe, don slip­pers and write a strongly-worded let­ter to the local news­pa­per about how this ‘check­ing in’ busi­ness is cor­rupt­ing society.

Instead, I made my Twit­ter client block them. Also, you can now do it too!

Suc­cess­Whale users will now see a link at the top-right of the inter­face called ‘Man­age Banned Phrases’. Click­ing it will take you to a page where you can spec­ify a semicolon-separated list of things you don’t want to see, such as “4sq.com;fallenlondon.com;bieber”. Once con­firmed, any tweets in any time­line that are sucky enough to con­tain one of these phrases will be hid­den from your view.

Twit­ter: now 12% less full of shite!

An extra fea­ture has been rolled into this release, which is the ‘Reply All’ but­ton. It looks like this: It only appears where two or more peo­ple are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion (three or more if you’re included too). Click­ing on it starts a reply to every­one men­tioned, not just the tweet’s orig­i­na­tor. So if @Alice is talk­ing to @Bob, and you click ‘Reply All’ on one of her tweets, your entry box will then read “@Alice @Bob”.

So that’s ver­sion 1.1. Share and enjoy!

Suc­cess­Whale is a free, open, multi-platform web-based Twit­ter client. It’s hosted at SuccessWhale.com, and you can find out more about Suc­cess­Whale here. It’s GPL–licenced, so you can down­load your­self a copy too if you want one.

Adrift in Time

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As Mark pointed out to me, it’s prob­a­bly rather strange to pick for your Best Man some­one who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left uni­ver­sity, it’s eas­ily over­ruled by the rest.

I mean, grad­u­a­tion was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.

In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but see­ing some­one once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t reg­is­ter in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.

To my shame I’ve spo­ken to those Uni­ver­sity friends less and less as time has gone on. The major­ity I don’t even reg­u­larly IM any­more — we’ve become Twit­ter friends, Face­book friends, peo­ple who com­ment on each oth­ers’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talk­ing to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for con­tact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Nor­mally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but some­times it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.

So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But hav­ing iso­lated the cause of that as my own reluc­tance to start instant mes­sen­ger chats, at least I have some­thing I can work on.

Breaking Out of Twitter

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Ear­lier this evening, @HolyHaddock linked to an entry on Brian Hurt’s blog enti­tled “Why I Quit Twit­ter”. In it, he argues for his leav­ing Twit­ter on the grounds that it is not a good place for debate and extended discussion:

If you want to debate me, I’m open to it. But for the debate to not be point­less, that means it has to be held some­where where ideas can be explored and com­plex argu­ments can be pre­sented. In email, in blog posts, in com­ments, some­where where there is room.

Twitter Conversation Thread

Fig­ure 1. The Problem

Which is fair enough. I would argue that Twit­ter has every right to be bad at con­ver­sa­tion — that’s not what it was cre­ated for. Once upon a time, it asked a sim­ple ques­tion: “What are you doing?”. The user base has shaped Twit­ter over the years, most notably in the for­mal­i­sa­tion of @usernames and #tags which began sim­ply as trends among users. But it has stuck res­olutely to its 140-character limit, with­out which I think the ser­vice would change for the poorer.

I have no real argu­ment with Brian Hurt here — his rea­son for leav­ing is a fine one, and he’s cer­tainly not sug­gest­ing any­one else should nec­es­sar­ily leave for that rea­son. Per­son­ally, I didn’t come to Twit­ter for extended con­ver­sa­tion, and I won’t be leav­ing for the lack of it.

But iron­i­cally @HolyHaddock and I did dis­cuss this prob­lem on Twit­ter, and it was prob­a­bly not long before the con­ver­sa­tion became annoy­ing to those that fol­low us both. (To dou­ble up the irony, I was also using a paste­bin to reply in more than 140 characters.)

I think the real issue here is that although Twit­ter does not well sup­port con­ver­sa­tions, peo­ple tweet things that are likely to start con­ver­sa­tions, and there is no real way to break out of Twit­ter once the con­ver­sa­tion has started. If we assume that Twit­ter has no inten­tion of allow­ing long — even infinite-length — replies, then if there is to be any way to ‘break out’, it must be through another service.

Now the friend­li­ness of the Twit­ter API makes it very easy for other sites to inte­grate with Twit­ter, allow users to sign in with their Twit­ter cre­den­tials, and pull tweets across for dis­play. But as I see it, there are a few issues that would need to be resolved with a poten­tial service:

  • Pulling Across. If a con­ver­sa­tion starts across mul­ti­ple tweets, these would need to be pulled across to a ‘break out’ con­ver­sa­tion so that things already said don’t have to be re-said. It’s easy to iden­tify the tweet that started it all, but no way in the API to find all replies to it. Start­ing from the most recent reply, one can find what it is in reply to and fol­low the thread all the way up, but if the con­ver­sa­tion has branched, you wouldn’t cap­ture it all.
  • Branch­ing vs Single-Threading. Multiply-branching threads aren’t too much of a prob­lem on Twit­ter, but dis­play­ing them prop­erly may become an issue on the ‘break out’ ser­vice. Reduc­ing every­thing to a sin­gle thread — blog com­ment style — is the alter­na­tive, but this could lead to some very con­fus­ing con­ver­sa­tions, not least if some users’ tweets are pro­tected and thus not vis­i­ble to cer­tain other users.
  • Report­ing Back. Should any­thing be passed back to Twit­ter to let other users know where the con­ver­sa­tion is con­tin­u­ing? How would we do that in a way that’s infor­ma­tive but not spammy? Should we instead rely on the user that ‘broke out’ to let the oth­ers know?
  • Per­ma­nence. Would there be a slight mis­trust of the ‘break out’ ser­vice, mean­ing that users would pre­fer not to use it in case it dis­ap­pears from the face of the ‘net tomor­row? How would we over­come this, and how would we allow users to cre­ate some per­ma­nent archive (e.g. down­load) of the ‘bro­ken out’ thread in case they have dis­cussed some­thing mean­ing­ful and worth keeping?
  • Wave. Some­one must have already done a Google Wave bot that will pull in tweets and let peo­ple do this, surely?
  • Pop­u­lar­ity. How would we let peo­ple know that this ser­vice exists, and how pop­u­lar would it be — how many peo­ple want this kind of ser­vice? (Many could be as much of a prob­lem as few.)

Tag­ging onto the Google Wave point, is there a ser­vice like this that already exists, in Wave or oth­er­wise? Any thoughts, oh great inter­web hive-mind?