Last year (the last time the Twitter ecosystem freaked out) UberMedia was making plans of acquiring Tweetdeck and launching it’s own hosted microblogging service. Interesting, Tweetdeck itself had been weighing this option. 

I dislike auto-posted tweets on LinkedIn and Facebook but I find this move odd. 

It’s interesting that they’ve improved the way their ‘post to Facebook’ tweets look but discontinued their LinkedIn relationship. I think it’s because LinkedIn Today (a great service) is mostly powered by the tweets people auto-post through to LinkedIn. Twitter must not like the competition. 

Could not agree more with this. 

When Twitter started to get traction, a year or two into their existence, I decided that Twitter was the Best Thing Ever. I realized that Twitter, because of their API, actually was a real-time protocol to connect various services in a novel way. I had debates with my other tech-nerd friends about whether Twitter could be one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet via their powerful API. When reporters or investors asked me what I thought the most exciting company in the valley was, I would invariably answer “Twitter”.

As I understand, a hugely divisive internal debate occurred among Twitter employees around this time. One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. In this scenario, Twitter would have turned into something like a realtime cloud API company. The other camp looked at Google’s advertising model for inspiration, and decided that building their own version of AdWords would be the right way to go.

As you likely already know, the advertising group won that battle, and many of the open API people left the company. While I can understand why the latter camp wanted to build an ad-based business, the futurist in me thinks this was a tragic mistake. If you are building an advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all 3rd-party clients, and lock down the data in the global firehose in order to control the “content”.

Nova Spivack’s article on the topic on how Twitter could monetize their API is also a really good read. 

It’s interesting that for past events like World Cup, Facebook launched their own page with information on it and users could vote for their country. It seems like now that Facebook has reached critical mass and there’s so many celebrity and country pages, Facebook doesn’t need to do this but instead wants to  push people to the various pages through a directory style page. 

I think this is a direct move against Twitter which is viewed much more as a news source, especially for live sporting events. I’m also really curious to see how Twitter will leverage their new hashtag pages that are specifically for events. Their first(?) one was with NASCAR, they’ve got to do something for the Olympics, especially since Twitter is already very popular in London.  

It’s basically a directory page versus an aggregation page. From a brand perspective (brand being the athletes and countries in this case) I would value Facebook’s approach which will send fans my way but as a user, I much prefer Twitter’s approach. Who wants to go follow all of those pages just to get the relevant news. Plus I bet brands (and athletes) will will still benefit from Twitter’s hashtag pages by creating valuable content which get’s aggregated. 

futurepostsnet:

Future Dated: October 15, 2017

With the 2013 launch of the Facebook phone, Zuck and crew started a trend of social startups and branded phones. While surprisingly, the Facebook phone has gone on to be the dominant version of the much-splintered Android platform, what was even more surprising…

(Source: )

I really, really dislike people who post all their Twitter updates to Facebook. It looks horrible and 90% of the posts are completely meaningless to Facebook users (most of whom aren’t on Twitter). 

I understand why people do it and I understand why Twitter encourages it but with so many tools allowing you when and what to post where, it’s not necessary to post everything. Even if you don’t use client like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, there are plugins like Selective Tweet that make it possible to choose which posts appear on Facebook. 

While I think that this move by Twitter is better than it was, I still think that it’s just noise and doesn’t add much value. I know people disagree with me but that’s okay. 

I’m sorry to say but this has marketing abuse all over it. While it’s something that could be used productively, the desire to game trending topics is too great. 

I think the trending topic is not as important as it once was and I think a service like this will just kill it.