This isn’t the last blog post I’m going to do about Chirp. There are a lot of elephants in the room. And I promised myself that I would immerse myself in the experience before blogging. The wifi issues kept me from tweeting for most of the conference, and I haven’t had time to review the live stream recordings, so you’ll see blog posts coming from me over the next few days.
First and foremost, as a technologist, I believe what Twitter has built and what they are growing is a stunning achievement! The metaphors of “water cooler” and “cocktail party” simply do not do justice to what Twitter is. There really is no metaphor I can think of to describe millions of people tweeting. You can, of course, draw parallels with social insect colonies, flocks of birds, large multi-cell organisms, and so on, but those are qualitatively different from a global network of hundreds of millions of what most of us believe are the most intelligent creatures on Earth.
In a previous post, I focused on the technologies under the hood, so I want to focus on the people who have built this phenomenon – people we developers work with on a daily basis. I was privileged to meet Mark McBride (@mccv), Raffi Krikorian (@raffi), John Kalucki (@jkalucki), Matt Sanford (@mzsanford), Kevin Weil (@kevinweil), Taylor Singletary (@episod), Marcel Molina (@noradio), Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) and Chloe Sladden (@ChloeS). There were many more that I wanted to meet – 150 Twitter employees can easily get swamped by something like 1000 developers.
Next, I want to talk about the announcements that were made at Chirp. I’m going to save the Promoted Tweets discussion for a later blog post, because I think it deserves special focus, and just talk about the developer-visible changes. The two most important in my opinion are @anywhere and user streams. User streams are a bit complex, so I’m going to defer them, but I think @anywhere is something every developer – indeed, anyone who wants to work with Twitter – needs to understand now.
@anywhere allows a developer to integrate Twitter into a web site with just a few lines of JavaScript. The Getting Started guide is here. Key functionality:
One key takeaway on @anywhere: make sure your Hovercard reflects your brand, personal or corporate.
Finally, I want to briefly mention one of the elephants in the room, the tension between the developer community and Twitter that sprung up in the wake of Fred Wilson’s blog post about “filling holes” and Twitter’s announcement of Twitter-branded iPhone and Blackberry client applications. I’ve held off blogging about it for a couple of reasons, and, as you’ll see in later blog posts, I think there are bigger elephants in the room.
I want to emphasize that if there is indeed any “tension” between Twitter vs. third-party developers, then I am solidly on Twitter’s side. I’m appalled at some of the messages I’ve seen posted on the Twitter API Google Group. And I’m sad when I read some of the blog posts about it. Worse yet, there are those who seem to want to play, “Let’s you and him fight.” I’m declining that invitation. Personal branding does mean, “Don’t be an asshole!”
