
Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of Twitter apps? - jsdalton
Practically every morning when I tune into HN, I find an announcement of at least one if not more new apps related to Twitter. I always check the comments to see if anyone else is as sick of Twitter apps as I am, but all I ever find are other hackers cheering them on.<p>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?<p>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.)<p>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.
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clintjhill
You aren't the only one thinking it's a waste of resources. However I learned
a little bit from the argument I received when I submitted about this
recently.

<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.

~~~
tptacek
Quick, rattle off 3 small Twitter applications that would improve a school
system. I'll start: snow days. Homework announcements. A continuous discussion
with teachers and parents about curricula. Volunteering.

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.

~~~
clintjhill
Just to be clear, I have my own project for the education space, it just isn't
"twitter" like.

I don't want it to look like I'm pissing and moaning without contributing to
the solution.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not saying you're goldbricking, I'm saying that you might be
underestimating how far Twitter can ride the network effect.

------
pg
Twitter's more than a company. It's a new protocol. (That's what makes it such
a big deal; new protocols are rare.) So it is no more wrong to find lots of
people building things on it than it would have been, at the corresponding
time, to find lots of people building things on http or email.

~~~
jsdalton
Well, except that Twitter is a private company and its API is proprietary in
that sense, unlike http or email. (Maybe a better analogy would be people
building MS Outlook plugins, way back when.)

I'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. :)

~~~
apgwoz
But, people _could_ adopt <http://identi.ca>, and help make laconi.ca a better
distributed platform and then transition to it. This isn't bound to happen
though, but it _could_.

~~~
ambition
To the extent that any "more open than twitter!" competitor begins to gain
adoption, twitter can simply open up a little bit to kill it.

Knowing this, why would anyone put a big financial and infrastructure
commitment into a more-open twitter clone?

~~~
apgwoz
But, if Twitter opens up a bit we all win! Ultimately, laconi.ca is attempting
to be a distributed, open Twitter. Any more openness in Twitter will help make
that happen, because laconi.ca can take advantage of new API methods to build
abstractions for it's own distributed service protocol.

------
rokhayakebe
You are not tired of Twitter apps. You are tired of someone slapping something
together without much due diligence, calling it a startup, and hopping they
will get techcrunched, raise venture capital and finally get acquired early on
for the low 7 figures. That's what you are tired of.

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.

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sjs382
I'm not /tired/ of them, but I'm not interested in most of the apps that
relate with how people use twitter: twitter clients, twitter recommendations,
etc.

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.

~~~
mikeyur
Data-mining and the ability to respond to Twitter users looking for something
would be huge.

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brk
Twitter kind of seems to be one of those you "get it" or you don't things
right now. Some people are wild fans, other people think it's a worst-of
hybrid of IRC and SMS.

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).

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sidsavara
Note, I may be biased as I just started (literally 12 hours ago) building my
own twitter app last night

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 =)

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nickb
Some people never learn what the true meaning of a sharecropper is. If you're
developing an app for Twitter, make it a part of your marketing budget and
don't build your whole business around it.

------
AndrewWarner
I'm tired of all these apps asking for my password.

~~~
adityakothadiya
if you are supposed to build an app, which absolutely needs a password, what
would you do?

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.

~~~
AndrewWarner
I'm not blaming the app creators. I think Twitter and other sites need to
learn from FriendFeed.

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sam_in_nyc
I've noticed this trend as well.

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.

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puzzle-out
Having recently moved back to London, and experienced the world of the
corporate commuter, I firmly take the line that any entrepreneurial activity
that is not illegal or immoral should be celebrated. The real waste in places
like the UK remains the lack of preparedness to create something and try to
make some money from it.

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kleneway
I'm tired of them, too. However, here are a few areas where I think building a
Twitter app can be useful.

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...

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floozyspeak
Nope. Its all just mass experimentation. 100 apps may come but 8 will stick.
You can either participate in the mass testing or just kick back and watch for
the sticky ones to surface in adoption.

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bbgm
There are probably too many Twitter apps, esp in the "me too" category, but
Twitter is worth that effort in general. It's rare that any web-based service
platform changes the way you function and Twitter has definitely done that not
only for me, but for a lot of people I know and not just the tech crowd.

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okeumeni
We see a lot of garbage Twitter App these days; mostly people don’t think
trough before posting some crap online. Because Twitter idea and app look and
feel so simple folks think they can just bring anything up and hit the
jackpot.

This should apply to any App idea: Think the dam thing thru before making fun
of yourself!!!

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trapper
I am sick of the recency bias. It turns smart programmers into blackbirds with
the "oooh shiny" phenomenon. People are spending more time keeping up with
things that just don't matter. I know I certainly spend much less time
scouring research sites (pubmed/citeseer et al) than before.

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lpgauth
I wonder why twitter doesn't build a application platform like facebook?

~~~
arockwell
They don't need one since they have an open api. They're not a walled garden
like Facebook.

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tocomment
I agree, it's another form of throwing sheep.

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officiallyrad
Haha, I had the same thought today :
<http://twitter.com/officiallyrad/status/1102966972>

(I know, kind of ironic I posted it on twitter...)

