Twitter, the good

I have been posting so much about what I did not understand about Twitter, I suppose it was time to post about the good. As much as I find hard to get most of it, I think there are really good things coming out of it. It is just I think we could improve the current blogging/social solutions so that similar good things could emerge from those solutions. In the end, if people favor twitter more than the other solutions, it will not matter so much. In the end I believe all those solutions will meet in the middle, as it should be, driven by the user’s needs.

I suppose the biggest difference for most people between something like Facebook is the way you can follow someone without their approval. People who are already famous (and companies I suppose) can’t really validate all their followers on by one. Witness Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN for a million followers.
The other cool feature is the open API which has been embraced by so many applications and devices. It makes it so easy to update Twitter any place, any time.

Even though I am still not sure why people would Twitter, not enough space for information and all, this any place, any time has some really cool applications in case of disaster (either political or ecological). I have not played with it but I believe you can directly upload pictures and movies now. That definitely will help with the lack of information that can be attached to it.

The best part is that while twitter represents the pulse of its members, you can get so much out of the chatter. Here is SalesForce.com trying to use the information from multiple social web sites including twitter.

I cannot help wondering if the social sites or blogs allow public/private profiles, with maybe a more granular level of privacy, and a cool public API, I am not sure if twitter will have much to stand one. On the other hand Twitter is looking more and more like a blog or the other web sites. Somehow I suppose they will all meet in the middle.

After I wrote this, a lot of things happened. Facebook acquired FriendFeed. Facebook has a Lite feature which apparently looks like Twitter. I suspect in the end, the one which will stay will be the one who manages to make money without offending its users. MySpace does not seem to be much in the news those days. Could it be that it was based on giving a music/performer’s platform. The music industry has been a bit in shambles with iTunes and the music industry not really knowing what to do. I have not heard of a platform dominating the market which is centered around music distribution aside of MySpace. Then again I am not really looking that much into it.

Web application or Client application

Just wanted to put what I thought down on paper (so to speak). I figure it would help trying to sort it out. The typical answer 5 years ago would have been a web application allows for quick deployment, avoids the dll hell but would have limited interface capability. Not sure any of this still applies.

On the client side, you can use java web start or the .NET equivalent. They can be downloaded and kept updated every time you launch it.

I suppose Applets, Silverlight and Adobe Flash take it to another level but you sill need to have a runtime engine installed. At least it would not change as often, the code gets updated on the fly and cached I believe if you do not need to change it. The size of the runtime is important, but I suppose not essential for me to figure out some more.

The web applications those days are fantastic, to the point where desktop applications try to look more like them. The boundaries are constantly being pushed. I am still amazed we can have a work processor and a spreadsheet with just html code (and JavaScript of course). Not always up to par but getting closer and closer. Not sure where Flash and Silverlight fit in, they can of course interact with the web pages. But they are not necessarilly part of the page. I am on the fence here as to where they belong. If they serve the page as opposed to be the page, I would be tempted to make part of the web technology.

However I have come across a few screens that I don’t believe would be possible in a web page. I am not one of those who think web applications are not user friendly, although I have found quite a few of those. The choice, as always, is it depends. What the requirements are should be the main driver. For complex screens, use Flash, and applet or Silverlight (no preference really). I think it should be the preferred solution and should only be rejected if notthing else can be done about it.

One of the greatest benefit I can see all applications benefited from the merge of those options is a greater freedom for designing the interface. We are not longer bound by what Microsoft thinks it should look like (the visual basic look I like to call it) or the not so good java look and feel. Every product should have a graphic designer, no matter how small the product.