Twitter Twaddle

It appears that Twitter may want to curtail third-party Twitter clients. Now I think Mashable might be overstating the case a little, and their failure to link to the forum post doesn’t bolster their case, but Twitter does want clients to act the same way.

Too bad they don’t practice what they preach.

I’ve used the official Twitter clients for web, MacOS X, and iPad. They all kind of look similar, perhaps as much as possible given the natures of the underlying platforms. But all three of them do things a little differently:

• Hover over a shortened link in the web client, and it displays a tooltip showing the expanded URL. Neither iPad nor OSX versions do that.
• Tap a tweet with no links or hashtags on the iPad, and you get the tweeter’s profile. Click the same tweet in the OSX client, and you get… nothing. On the web client, you get other recent tweets from that account.
• The OSX client has a pretty slick way of handling multiple accounts — avatars for each account appear in the sidebar and you can click on them to switch. I don’t see that on either the web or iPad clients.
• In the OSX and iPad clients, retweeting gives you a “quote tweet” option that the web client doesn’t.

Even if Twitter’s own clients worked the same across all platforms, I’d say they’re jumping the gun by trying to limit third-party development. In addition to the Twitter clients, TweetDeck (my primary client until recently), and a FireFox plugin called EchoFon on occasion. TweetDeck is an elaborate client, offering simultaneous views of user-defined lists. For example, I have my main tweetstream, mentions, several searches, direct messages, and new followers in separate panels. It’s a very nice way to keep up with a lot of info at once… too bad it uses Adobe AIR, which makes it screw up under heavy load. EchoFon is very simple, and lives in the bottom right corner of the browser until you pop it up to see what’s going on. Both of them offer different ways to interact with Twitter from the “official” clients, and depending on what you need they can be better ways.

In short, the Twitter ecosystem is far from being complete. Even if it was, it needs to be able to evolve to meet the needs of the people using it. The Twitter developers themselves know a lot about the system internals, but they’re somewhat removed from the people actually using the system day-in day-out. The users know what they want to do and how they want to do it — let the creativity of third-party app developers fill the needs, and leverage the knowledge gained. In other words, adapt the most popular new features to your own apps.

But first, get your own apps working the same way before you demand that third-party developers do likewise.

Head in the Cloud(s)

I haven’t lost my mind, it’s backed up on tape somewhere. — Unix fortune cookie

Tech-utopians believe that we’re approaching the point where the human mind could actually be uploaded into — and run on — computer hardware. I’m firmly in the skeptic camp on this one: perhaps some memories and sensory impressions could eventually be copied; after all, it’s already possible to stimulate certain memories or impressions by probing certain parts of the brain. If quantum computing offers insights into how our minds work, those copies could happen. BUT, can personality be both captured and then run on some kind of hardware? I doubt it.

On the other hand, some of my memory — and most likely some of yours as well — is already stored outside our heads. From the paper address book/calendar, to the lowliest PDA, to our calendar programs, to the fanciest cloud-based PIMs, we’ve offloaded a lot of the basic information we need to do our work (or not get whined at by a friend or family member whose birthday just went by), replacing it with a habit to “check the calendar” on occasion. A lot of this information is useful and even crucial — your mom’s birthday, your anniversary, that scheduled meeting with a potential customer. Some of it, like Amazon’s wish list, can be hazardous to your budget… instead of forgetting about that gadget you saw and thought was cool, add it to your wish list and come back for it later.

The tricks are, of course, to:

1) Make it so easy to add that information to your repository, wherever you are, whenever you need to, that you just do it without thinking much about it.

2) Extract that information — or better yet, have it automatically presented to you — at the right time.

As much as I like to slag on cellphones, they really do help with part 1 — even if you don’t have a signal at the crucial moment, you can often configure the phone to bring up an audio recorder without too much effort. I set up my old Samsung Sync to bring up the recorder by pressing one of the arrow keys, if I remember right. Of course, the smarter the phone, the easier it can be to find useful information entry apps. On the other hand, if you want to pay for Jott, you can use any phone capable of dialing a number (Jott converts a brief voice message to text and can return it to you in a large number of ways).

But the other side of the coin is getting that information back at the right time. Again, there are plenty of ways to make that happen. While Remember the Milk is popular, I kind of like Chandler for its open-source, cross-platform goodness. Unfortunately, the client is currently broke for Leopard and Snow Leopard; there’s supposed to be a workaround, but it didn’t work for me. Once they get the client working again, I’d love to see a full-function iPad client; right now, there’s a write-only “Chandler QE” (Quick Entry) iPhone app that’s okay for brief notes and events. Directly accessing notes at the Chandler Hub is a workaround on the laptop for now… I can’t enter text from the iPad for whatever reason though (grumble mumble) except by using the iPhone app (snarl hiss).

One thing I’ve started using Chandler for is to capture whatever random thoughts about White Pickups wander through my mind at any given moment. I thought I was going to start working on the last part of Book I today at lunch, and realized I needed to give the plot a little more thought… into the iPhone I went and added the information, now it’s on the hub whenever I’m ready for it.

So as always, you get your choice between free (or Free) and community-supported, or paid for and (maybe) reliability. The big problem I see with the latter is that going with a commercial cloud-based service is like giving your data to some corporation and then renting it back. Everything’s fine until you can’t make the next payment.