Newly Ancient

As should be expected in any liberal arts curriculum (even in the Middle East), one of my classes is veering into feminism. Which inspired this bit of code:

class Woman extends Man implements Person
{
	public $hair;
	public $skin;
	public $face;
	public $legs;
	public $breasts;
	private $vagina;
	// private $personality;
	
	public function think( $concept )
	{
		return null;
	}
	
}

Since (in both the chronological and causal sense) Twitter announced changes to its API last Wednesday, the Internet intelligentsia has been raising a ruckus. Justifiably so. Though the outlines of these changes have been on the horizon for a while, this new move clearly shows where Twitter is heading as a company and service. And I’m not quite sure that’s a direction I want to be following.

The Company

With this move, Twitter is making it clear that it means businessenterprise. Just the fact that the announcement is written in MBAease clarifies that Twitter now thinks of itself more as a corporation than a startup. Indeed, its infamous quadrant with social CRM and social influence ranking makes it clear that the company is focused more on monetizing and consolidating than on continuing to innovate. Of course, we know how well that went for other companies.

The Service

There’s nothing inherently wrong with attempting increased monetization except when it ends up being counter-productive. For Twitter, increased attempts at consolidation will quite possibly kill it.

The first problem for Twitter is that its service depends upon the very environment it’s seeking to quash. Many of its best features, from @replies to #hashtags, originally came from users. And it was the simple accessibility of the API which quickly made Twitter nearly ubiquitous—even your house can Tweet now. Without this robust ecosystem, Twitter is essentially just a text field—something that any freshman CS student could pull together in an afternoon.¹ Microsoft, for example, can afford to have MBAs run the company, because the switching costs are high. For Twitter, they’re negligible. Anyone can build a text box.

Twitter’s second major problem is one of direction: it’s astronomically easier to go from closed to open than from open to closed. Apple can get away with tight restrictions because before the App Store existed nobody felt entitled to install applications on their phone. Even in going from open to closed, Twitter could potentially succeed if that change provided a meaningful benefit to users. Facebook was more restricted than Myspace, but those restrictions came with the benefit of not having my eyeballs seared out from using it. Twitter is going in the opposite direction: it’s restricting us to its main website which is, for your average alpha user, shittier than it was a few years ago.

Though these problems won’t prompt an immediate exodus from Twitter (indeed, only 23% of posts come from external apps), Twitter should still be worried. It was that 23% which first left Myspace, Yahoo, and AOL. Particularly for a service as simple as Twitter’s, they really matter—what your tech-savvy friend is using has a greater impact than where Bieber is. Especially if we start to see a chilling effect where new developers don’t include Twitter functionality in their apps due to the possibility of it being cut out of the ecosystem.

Ownership

My biggest objection to the changes is mostly philosophical. With the new display requirements, Twitter is asserting ownership over my content there. I agree with Marco’s reading: rule 5b would seem to preclude me from quoting my own tweets on my own blog without their wrapper. This seems more like something an archaic wire service might try than the policy of a tech startup. Indeed, it make Twitter’s viewpoint quite clear: our content and attention is their property to be sold to corporations for advertising and “social CRM” (whatever that is).

App.net

Twitter’s announcement came at the perfect time for app.net, which easily met its funding goal thanks to the general outcry in the web crowd. But I really don’t think the way it’s being portrayed matches either its potential or position. Despite what internet bloggers and campaign commercials say, there’s nothing inherently virtuous about running an old-fashioned business where customers pay you. Thus, app.net isn’t even truly quixotic: it’ll likely fail, but it was never virtuous.

Probably the biggest reason it will fail is that for the vast majority of people, the $50 annual cost for the service far exceeds the utility it provides. Thus, the service will end up being the playground of the people with $50 to spare for an empty text box. While Twitter might end up being filled with only people following Bieber I likely follow a couple of Bieber-fans and wouldn’t enjoy a platform without some of the regular people.

My other major problem with app.net is that it isn’t even doing what it purports to do. Instead of only charging users, it’s charging both sides of the market. Thus, members are being sold the privilege of being sold to app developers for up to $1000. That might not seem like much for a legitimate business, but it’s the sort of cost which is prohibitively expensive for quick projects and will seriously limit the ecosystem around app.net—you won’t see the ubiquitous support which Twitter currently enjoys.

My Plans

I don’t know where things are headed, but I’m guessing the future is neither Twitter or app.net. Until the future comes around, I’m putting my time where my mouth is and spent the weekend building a Twitter clone for Habari. The system I’ve designed has a couple of benefits:

• I control the content, through Habari, so Twitter certainly can’t complain about me quoting their material.
• For now, microposts are posted over to Twitter. Once the future comes, it’ll be easy enough to post them there as well.
• For ease of mobile use, I can take advantage of the Twitter ecosystem by posting to a secret account which will be subsequently mirrored over here and on my main Twitter account.

This is likely a violation of Twitter’s new requirements, so go ahead and subscribe to my microposts over here. And get started on inventing the future—or just fork mine.

Although over the past two years of my studies I’ve been drawn toward more human fields (primarily economics), I continue to love coding. Indeed, the times I spend coding are some of the best moments I have, partially because time disappears. While I’ve enjoyed dabbling in other areas, coding up something is still my favorite way to spend a night.

All this merely serves as an explanation of why I spent several hours converting the theme for this site into one anybody can use. It’s a fairly-customizable theme for Habari which I designed to take advantage of the innovations on that platform, particularly modules and areas.

So, if you’re interested in imitating the design of this site, just head on over to the project page and download Shield. Though I doubt many people will end up using this (if only because of Habari’s minuscule reach), it’s been fun to develop and will also give me an incentive to start designing a new theme for this site (after all, I can’t have too many imitators).

Also, I must say I’m quite proud of my project lab. As it serves as the home for numerous projects (primarily Habari bookmarks and plugins), constantly updating it would take too much work. Thus, I have developed a system on top of Habari which pulls in all the data, including releases and help information, from GitHub. If you want something similar, check out the plugin and theme which power it.

So, check out my theme. I promise more substantive posts will be coming soon (I have a ton queued up in Simplenote).