Twitter goes Facebook by injecting foreign content into your stream and Twitter’s New “Buy” Button Lets You Make In-Tweet Purchases
There was a time with Jack Dorsey dreamt of a service that literally saved the world. Using the simplicity of SMS and the fact that SMS is built into literally every single cell-phone sold in the last 10 years, this service would allow communication without borders to everyone!
Imagine a person who has never used a computer to tweet their thoughts, ideas and life to a world audience to broadcast war, poverty, injustice. This was the dream of Jack Dorsey.
Then Twitter had to start making money and you get what we have today. I’m simply disappointed in what Twitter has become. The service is mostly spam-bots, the pushing around of TwitPic and requiring developers to move to a token-based API (remember Tweetdeck for Mac?) and that new API means Twitter can inject ads into any application that access their stream meaning even if I pay money for an app, it’ll still have ads that make money for Twitter. Now they’re going to start putting foreign content from people I don’t care about into my stream, they’ve also done a good job of censoring accounts that are bringing news to the masses.
Twitter has millions of shareholders and they’ve forgotten Dorsey’s dreams.
I get it. I’m a capitalist as well and eventually, Twitter had to make money. Ads are proven to work but if I was still a Twitter use, I’d pay money to not have any of these features that Twitter has been rolling out. Smart people work @ Twitter and Google and Facebook. The fact that none of them charge a membership fee means that this is not the right path but ads are everywhere and that’s our future going forward.
I hope Dorsey succeeds at becoming a billionaire and releases Twitter Alpha source code (with the approval of the board) for free. I’d use it and I’m sure many others would as well. Then again, it’s not that easy. I still think there’s hope for a global community board that doesn’t come with all of the BS that Twitter has now.
App.net failed at this so maybe I’m just a crazy idealist shouting in the dark.