Twitter Stomps on 3rd Party Tool Community (Was it inevitable?)
This week it was revealed that Twitter was going to release its own url shortener. This news comes on the back of Twitter acquiring the iPhone Twitter app Tweetie (along with the company behind it). These two stories together represent Twitter essentially turning its back on the 3rd party tool community that has helped turn Twitter in to the success it is today. After all, can you imagine Twitter without mobile apps and Tweetdeck?
But was this inevitable? Should we all have been so foolish to think this was not going to happen.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. I am sure the owners of Atebits (the maker of Tweetie) have no hard feelings about it - since they are benefiting (to the tune of $ millions).
Twitter in essence made a brilliant business play. They developed a cool new micro-blogging platform and quickly released an extensive API that allowed a myriad of 3rd party developers to create a virtual industry around creating apps that interact with Twitter. Then they just sit back and wait. The community voted with their usage of the best and most wanted apps - and then Twitter can either acquire them, or build it themselves.
From a business perspective this is brilliant, from a 3rd party app developer standpoint - it sucks. There is no way around it. Hundreds of us spent many months, some years, developing software that Twitter can (and did) render irrelevant in a day.
We knew this was coming. So why did I push forward with the development of br.st?
1. Business is a risk, and developing 3rd party tools is always an even bigger risk due to its dependence on the main party's software/business. Getting out of bed in the morning is a risk. You have to take risks.
2. No one knew what direction Twitter was going to go. If they would have taken a different direction it could have benefited us.
3. There was always that possibility they could have chosen br.st to purchase or another company could have purchased br.st.
4. In the still unproven world of social media, it is anyone's guess what business software strategy will work. For example, did anyone think that Facebook would unseat the once king of the hill MySpace.
5. We could afford to take the risk. Brinkster (the parent company), is a long established solid company that could afford to take the risk of spending several months trying its hand at social media.
I feel bad for all the companies and people that based their entire existence around Twitter. My best advice is to try again, keep taking risks. Your idea could be the next Farmville app for Facebook (60+ million) users or it could go the way of Friendster.
In the end we have focused back on our core compitencies and learned several lessons. And we will keep moving forward...
- Jared (Follow me on Twitter - @JaredStauffer)
Br.st is Giving Away 21 Wii Systems & 4 MacBook Pros
Announcing the Br.st 25 Days of Christmas Giveaway!
Last week we launched br.st. We worked hard to make sure it was the best place to experience Twitter on the net. We did not get the press coverage we anticipated. So, to get the word out we decided instead of buying advertising we would do a giveaway contest and give the money in the form of prizes to our users.
We are giving away 21 Nintendo Wii game systems every day (except Fridays) from December 1st through December 24th. AND we are giving away 4 MacBook Pros (13 inch) every Friday in December.
It is pretty simple to enter: login to br.st, click the Wii or MacBook button on the right sidebar, submit the tweet, and you are entered! You can enter each giveaway up to five (5) times per day. And you have to re-enter the contest every day for the Nintendo Wii and every week for the MacBook Pro.
Read the main giveaway page, the FAQs, and the rules. Here's to hoping you win!
My first experience running Google Chrome OS
I came across a tweet that talked about running the new Google Chrome OS in a virtual machine. Since I was intrigued and excited from the video demos yesterday I decided to install it and give it a try. After a few hiccups I had it up and running. I followed this guide to get it running. To install is you can go here to get the downloads you will need.
A few first observations and then the screenshots are below.
- The OS does indeed load in less than 7 seconds.
- You login to it with an @gmail.com user name and password.
- Once it loads you are pretty much in/using the Chrome web browser.
- If you turn it off and then turn it back on you come back to the exact same "spot" you were when you shut it down.
- Because of the fast startup time it reminds me of using my iPhone.
- It appears you can do with/on Chrome OS pretty much anything you can do through the Chrome web browser on a PC.
Today br.st was Released
Today br.st was released. This project is near and dear to my heart. I conceived the original idea for br.st back in July as a leading URL shortener and then with my team evolved in to the killer twitter client it is today over the last several months.
Huge kudos go out to my team at @brinkster for help in designing and developing this tool: Nat, Clint, August, Jason and Marc.
Br.st truly has some unique features that we are very proud of. It is the first web based Twitter client to auto shorten URLs as you type them. It is the only Twitter client to have Text Shortening (the feature loved by all and derided by English majors). You can share images or files, see geo tags in a google map, view advanced stats on links/images/files shared. It has an awesome open conversation feature that works like no other Twitter client. AND you can email in from your mobile phone images to post and a tweet in the subject line!
See screenshots of all of these cool features here: http://br.st/features.aspx.