Ed. note: if you’re new to microblogging and Twitter, please feel free to just mark this post as read, ignore the email, move on to the next post, etc. It’s from a comment I left on a “Friendfeed and Twitter, where are we going with all this?” post on www.stoweboyd.com
Boy, I’d love to know some of the answers behind these questions. We’ve all talked for a long time about the relationships and “cast of characters” on Twitter being another reason “we” “won’t” leave (haven’t left).
But another thing I don’t hear a whole bunch about, when these FriendFeed-Twitter-Plurk(PLURK?!)-Pownce-Jaiku angst-a-thons come up, is the Twitter ecosystem. It seems to me that’s a big part of Twitter’s competitive edge and utility. No matter how cool the upstarts are, are they interoperable with Twitter’s “accessories” the many applications Twitter now feeds and is fed from?
On a regular basis on Twitter I use: Seesmic, Qik, Utterz, Summize, Tweetscan, Terraminds, TwitterBerry, Twhirl, is.gd, Tweetburner, Jott, TwitterFone, [Twittergram], Foxy/Twittytunes, Tweeterboard, Hashtags, Tweme, Rememberthemilk and Xpensr. Those last two are my favorite new use of Twitter: as a convenient, centralized “command line” to get data into my applications.
There are dozens and dozens of 3rd party applications that work with and through Twitter, not to mention the various bots (everything from mindfulness chimes to mainstream media news alerts to pr0n links) that have been created. I can think offhand of dozens of custom scripts, hacks, web and desktop and mobile clients, widgets and more that friends use. There are probably thousands of things “living” in Twitter world. There’s also a tremendous circulatory system of RSS feeds going into and out of Twitter streams and tying in other platforms like blogs and Facebook.
Can all this stuff be adapted to feed off of (and into) other APIs quickly and easily, should the momentum shift to another service? I’m not techie enough to answer that. But it seems to be a somewhat formidable barrier to entry, even at this embryonic stage.
Of course, Twhirl has been adapted to work with FriendFeed as well as Twitter, so perhaps it’s quite simple. Perhaps.
Seriously… PLURK?
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