

New Twitter, JTV RFSes; Winter 2010 deadline pushed back 2 days - pg
http://ycombinator.com/w10announcement.html

======
ryanwaggoner
Twitter is _not_ a protocol, any more than Windows or Myspace or Symbian are
protocols. Twitter is a proprietary platform under the control of a single
company, and treating it as a protocol is dangerous to both companies and
their users.

~~~
gord
both agree and not..

The internet was pretty closed when DARPA owned it and so TCP was proprietary.
Fortunately it became ubiquitous, was written up in an RFC and we can all
inter-operate now.

Calling it a 'protocol' is useful.

~~~
davepeck
Related: the Birds of a FETHR slide deck and audio.

<http://brdfdr.com/pres/>

A case for distributed microblogging, and a protocol to match.

~~~
dagw
Distributed blogging you say. Sounds like this newfangled NNTP protocol I just
read about might be just the thing. Maybe I could build a startup around that

~~~
davepeck
I think you should read it more carefully. It has nothing to do with NNTP.
(Also: sarcasm of this stripe hardly contributes to quality discussion.)

------
dawie
It's really cool that the founders will have full access to the Justin TV team
and the Twitter team. I bet that this will be a great competitive advantage.

------
pmjordan
There's a vague RFS3 idea that's been festering in my brain for a few months,
and since I have a cofounder problem (i.e. I don't have one) I'd love it if
someone with more time would implement this:

My problem with Twitter is that I can only select information by author. A lot
of stuff people say is uninteresting to me, but I follow anyway because some
of it is good. As a corollary, finding new people to follow is tricky.

There are the search feeds, and while some topics are easily filtered by a
couple of keywords, most of the time this becomes too complex to keep up. I'd
like to be able to train a classifier for stuff I'm interested in, weighted by
whether the person is my friend, etc. New tweets would be given a score
(possibly in more than one dimension) and presented accordingly.

~~~
neurotech1
IMHO This is a good idea.

One reason why I don't use twitter much is that a lot of tweets are
uninteresting. Perhaps a Google-style Markov algorithm could work for
filtering a feed.

~~~
jlees
Markov?

The problem with filtering is that defining interesting is practically NP-
complete.

~~~
neurotech1
I am not at the level of Sergey Brin by any means, but if the its parent feeds
are given a value based on how many people follow them, relative to others of
similar keywords, there would be a mathematical way to filter them.

I could be completely wrong.. but its out there.

------
Alex3917
Twitter idea: Every day people I'm following post "I'll be at X in two hours
doing Y." It would be great if that information could be pulled out of Twitter
and put somewhere useful, like my Calendar or in an iPhone app.

(And while we're at it I still want a day planner that plans my day for me,
based on my ToDo list, what my friends are doing, and what's going on around
me.)

~~~
wdm954
Check out <http://taweet.com> \-- May have some of the features you are
looking for.

------
anApple
I would welcome it if they would give everybody access to their firehose api
(against payment), and not just to their buddies...

~~~
jmtulloss
It's probably not trivial to put the firehose in place. Until they have some
way of reliably and scalably opening it up and charging for it, close partners
are probably the only practical customers.

~~~
mseebach
400 tweets/sec + metadata comes out to less than 0.5 mbit/sec or approx 4.5
GB/day. That's less than a dollar daily in traffic costs at the Amazon rates,
lowest tier.

One can see why they don't want everyone and their mother pulling it, but it's
hardly rocket-science, once the infrastructure is set up.

------
mkull
So I can't be the only one, what's an RFS?

~~~
mkull
Thanks, and now I see the TechCrunch Article and all is clear...
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/twitter-and-y-
combinato...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/twitter-and-y-combinator-
team-up-for-startup-stream-access/)

------
gbookman
Will the November 5th invitation date remain unchanged?

~~~
pg
Yes, everything else is unchanged.

------
pmjordan
Uhh, dodgy markup:

    
    
      <head>
      <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="yc.css">
      <title>Winter 2010 Announcement</b>
      </head>
    

Opera barfs on the unclosed title tag. Maybe others too.

EDIT: fixed indeed. Thanks. Everyone, stop upvoting.

~~~
pg
Fixed; thanks.

------
dennismoulton
Wow, to say that Twitter owns the protocol is quite a statement at this early
stage of the game for this space. Twitter just took the number one third-party
feature and integrated it into their own platform, it’s called lists and if
you don’t have it you will soon. What would protect me from the same?
“Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the
recipients." Let’s not be so shortsighted here. The opportunity is to innovate
in the space and that just doesn’t mean on top of. Sounds like we just limited
our options to those that can partner with instead of those that compete.

------
Ye-Ha
After reading your library, I have something to say to YC, but no way I'm
stupid enuf to post it on the Internet!

P.S. I'll give you a hint: the demographics celebrated in your start-up post
vs. me. 49 yr old female: 2 level 80's in WoW + many other lower lvls, living
with engineers at my house to get this great idea off the ground and get our
application submitted (since Friday), .... YC can read the rest about me in my
application, don't think that anyone else can :-(......

------
Ye-Ha
Woo Hoo!

We couldn't be happier because we had already integrated Twitter and now know
what API's that we can use for our on-line debates!

On-line presence is limited and only static right this second, however, it is
our goal that anyone who looks at them will 'get it' (especially our moms).
Feedback appreciated.

<http://bheardusa.com/>

@BHeardusa

#BHeard

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bootload
_"... We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to
encourage people to built stuff on top of it. .."_

Is building apps using Twitter what building apps to MS was?

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adrianwaj
I have a completed application just sitting here addressing the RIAA ready to
submit, but my partner took a Big 4 consulting job a few days ago. Dohl.

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billclerico
all twitter needs now is a rabid steve ballmer and they're well on their
way...

DEVELOPERS

