Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of Twitter apps?
So, am I the only one who thinks there's an enormous waste of developer/entrepreneurial resources here? Aren't there more interesting problem spaces for developers to explore -- especially ones that are relevant to people outside the ubergeek set most us belong to?
This isn't meant to be a rant against Twitter, and it's certainly not a rant against any individual one of those apps or developers working on them. (In fact, I posted this as a separate discussion because I didn't one to impugn any one developer or group's efforts.)
But I'm just curious if anyone else feels the same way as I do -- or if Twitter is such a revolutionary new platform, akin to email or blogging, that I'm being short-sighted in poo-pooing innovation efforts in the space.
43 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 89.9 ms ] threadI'm just not convinced that it's more than a fad within the development community, and I'm even less convinced that if it is indeed something more than a fad, it will remain confined to a single company's API.
But I've been wrong plenty of times before and I doubt anyone will notice if I'm wrong again. :)
Knowing this, why would anyone put a big financial and infrastructure commitment into a more-open twitter clone?
I'm developing one, but even though the space is growing more and more crowded I'm not concerned. It's not being done as a primary source of income, but as a side project to help build my development skills as it provides unique problems which I don't face in my day to day web development.
I've been using Twitter, and I find it mildly entertaining. The business uses somewhat elude me, as the more people you follow the harder it is to see the nuggets of useful info in between updates of the weather and what people are eating for lunch.
The marketing types obviously love Twitter, but they seem to consume any new mechanism for connecting with "eyeballs" at rapidly increasing alarming rates.
So, I'm not tired of the Twitter apps. Some of them have been useful or interesting to me (there was one today, whoshouldifollow.com), and others that seem completely useless (won't name names).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417522
In my post I was speaking to the "I did this in X hours" kinds of projects I was seeing. I said there ought to be better problems to hunt down and solve. Some railed against me saying I didn't talk about big enough problems. Some said beginners ought to do things that are "quick and easy" as to gain feedback and see a project through.
I don't buy any of that. I'm going on my 10th year of software development and almost everyday I find myself feeling like a beginner. And I still see Twitter based apps finding "oops" in tweets to be a pretty big waste when our school systems can't properly share data. However I obviously haven't found a way to articulate my feelings in the best way yet.
I learned that not everyone cares about "good problems". They care about "cool problems". The good problems are the ones that are hard and may take more than 4 hours to really even understand. And probably quite longer to solve. The cool problems are much different. They aren't problems really and are mostly made up features looking for an audience.
There are many people smarter than I that will call Twitter a protocol and liken it to the next sliced bread. I look at the schools my daughters will be attending and I wonder why they can't get their crap together.
I'm not in love with Twitter, but the value is apparent to me: it's a social networking tool that just gets out of the way.
I don't want it to look like I'm pissing and moaning without contributing to the solution.
i don't use twitter or SMS, and i use my cell phone simply for free calling with my folks, so i don't assume that twitter apps (or cell phone apps) could help students or school administrators.
knowlege about the market is always a far more significant unknown for me than technological unknowns.
(He's an IT guy at one of the suburban school districts out here, which is why he knows exactly what his users want.)
Exactly, and sadly true.
First, if you take advantage of the fact that a semi-interesting Twitter app can get lots of press right now, you can use it as a way to promote your real money-maker app. For hackers, it's probably way more fun (and cheap) to spend a day building an app than sending 50 Emails to bloggers begging for a post.
Second, if you truly do it on your downtime for your the pure joy of imagining something and seeing it come to life. Wasting time is relative, it's more productive than watching TV, playing WoW or Xbox, random web surfing, etc...
This should apply to any App idea: Think the dam thing thru before making fun of yourself!!!
It doesn't bother me that there is innovation, but I do get tired of seeing them on Hacker News unless it is something that has been created by someone/group I consider part of the hacker news community
But that's because I would be interested in any hacker created product. I enjoy some of the "I did this in X hours" kinds of projects
On days when I'm not in the mood for it, I let them slide
Of course, I'm not saying anybody else's opinion is less valid - some people may be sick of them, and I can understand that. I get tired of seeing updates to stories that I wasn't interested in to begin with, but there is little I can do about that as well =)
But you cannot blame someone who is trying to make it out of the rat race. At least they are competing. They will probably build 12 "stupid" apps before finding lucky 13. That last one will be the result of their pointless Twitter apps and honest feedbacks.
don't blame that developer. blame Twitter for doing lousy job. Look at how FriendFeed handles Password requirement by giving Remote Key.
Developers are not happy to ask users passwords in text format. They simply don't have other option.
What I am EXTREMELY interested in is two things:
1. Data-mining twitter 2. Twitter as an interface for other (standalone) applications such as rememberthemilk, sugarstats, mymilemarker, etc.
(I know, kind of ironic I posted it on twitter...)
I think the lesson here is that the simpler the idea, the better. Let communities of people who care do the work for you. If you can provide some sort of platform, even if it is something as simple as: "140 chars or less text comments, sent to people who choose to see them, and allowing these text comments to be sent from multiple sources."
Don't get me started about how over hyped twitter is. It's got a great name and got insanely lucky with its adoption... and if someone could write up a blog entry about how they got so popular that would be great as well. They must have had some popular early adopters.
Back to the "app a day" (pun intended) topic. I wonder to myself, are these apps meant to make money, or are they just people playing around? Have any serious twitter apps, besides summize, been acquired?
I think the more abstract trend, at the moment, is "hack something together in a few days and see what happens." Things along the line of http://nowdothis.com.
My gut tells me they see a spike in traffic, then nobody really cares. What people want now is stuff that connects them to other people, easily. JuicyCampus, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. It's about being social in the right way.