One of the genius moves that made Twitter so potent was a decision to maintain a simple, open API. By granting access to the most interesting parts of the system—the members and content—Twitter has inspired widespread development of third-party applications that cross platforms, integrate with other systems, and contribute new ways for members to interact with the information stream.
Maintaining an open API spreads the burden of development and recruitment into the community of users.
Open development is a means of building community
There has been some discussion recently on what defines “Web 3.0,” a cheesy convention to label the evolution of the World Wide Web. Perhaps that next dimension is not so much computers talking to each other like humans (the notion of a Semantic Web) but users co-developing systems. If Web 2.0 was a merging of consumer and producer, then the next step is to merge application development to allow users to make programmatic connections with whatever platforms they use.
An open API is nothing new, but Twitter may very well be the poster child for the positive effect a good API strategy can have on community development.
With every new application comes a trickling effect that helps form stronger roots. The developer, likely already a devout twitterer, creates a tool that (a) makes Twitter more accessible, and (b) becomes a secondary focal point for Twitter usage. The only thing Twitterrific is good for is accessing Twitter, for instance, so anyone with a vested interest in that application or the developers who created it now has a stronger interest in Twitter.
The release of new applications also produces discussion, typically in the form of blog posts, wiki updates, and inclusion in comprehensive lists. This exposure lives on past the initial release of the third-party software and expands the Twitter network to reach even more potential members. Similarly, the development cycle of iterations and upgrades generates recurring waves of this kind of reaction, inviting both critique and competition to respond to the news. More application means a larger reach.
None of this happens without third-party development of Twitter tools.
Helping matters further is a parallel proliferation of tools to make development easy. With coding platforms like Microsoft’s PopFly, one doesn’t have to be a hardcore programmer to be able to build a widget. Adobe’s AIR platform has also launched a number of Twitter applications. In an interview published in Ars Technica, award-winning Spaz developer Ed Finkler describes his development process:
AIR has another development path, one not shared by any of the other major RIA platforms—you can make apps using HTML and Javascript, the same way you’d create a rich browser-based application. And while I wasn’t a Javascript guy by any means, I knew HTML and CSS very well.
My first proof-of-concept was an AIR app built on Beta 1 that just loaded and displayed the Twitter public timeline, auto-refreshing every minute. Getting that working was surprisingly easy, in part because I was using the Spry JS framework from Adobe, which makes grabbing data from various sources and displaying it in HTML a piece of cake. That early prototype looked much better than the original Spaz, and it was much, much faster to develop.
Source: “Twitter with Spaz.AIR: Interview with developer Ed Finkler” (Oct. 11, 2007)
Throw in Ruby, Java, the open source Processing programming language, and the WordPress plug-in community, and there are many ways to contribute to Twitter’s success without following an information stream.
Other companies are noticing the positive effects of open systems—Pownce and Meebo announced APIs recently, and LinkedIn promises to become a development platform as well.
When it comes to keeping track of the many applications available to support or enhance the use of Twitter, there is no better resource than the Twitter Fan Wiki. That site currently lists 186 applications available for use with Twitter:
- 78 Desktop applications—including Windows (29), Mac (17), Linux (9), Multi Platform (16), Second Life (4) and Others (3)
- 68 Web applications—including Search Engines (11), Email Alerts and Posting (8), Badges and Widgets (9) and Others (40)
- 30 Mobile applications—including iPhone/iPod Touch (3)
- 10 Browser Addons or Plugins
They range from visualizations of the public tweet stream to mashups that serve specific communities, such as diabetics posting sugar intake or dieters trying to lose weight.
While I am not going to make the effort to duplicate that list here, I will discuss a sampling of what the Twitter developer community has accomplished with that open API.
Access to publish and consume
One of the best interfaces to arise out of the open API is Twitterrific by Icon Factory. This desktop application works only on a Macintosh and accounts for about 9 percent of all tweets, according to the Twitter Facts blog. (Read/Write Web recently conducted a similar analysis and came up with 14.1% of the tweet were posted with Twitterrific.) While that is far behind the Twitter web interface, Twitterrific is the leading third-party application despite its platform constraints. They recently began to monetize the application’s popularity by running ads, offering a fee option to remove them.
Arguably the most appealing feature is an ambient one: Tweets pop up from the desktop application and remain for only a few seconds before disappearing. The level of interruption is minimal and requires no additional action to return to the previous state. Why other applications haven’t mimicked this feature is a mystery.
For the rest of the Twitter community, a host of a applications offer similar access. Twitteroo was one of the early Windows-only options, but it is losing ground to AIR applications, like Snitter and Tweetr. There is also an interesting cross-system notification tool for Windows called FizzBoost, which includes Facebook news streams as well. Mobile phone users have their own pecking order of cell phone interfaces. In fact, almost every channel for short messaging—be it web browsers, handheld devices, email clients, instant messaging, or even simple voice messages—has a way to publish tweets.
Mashups with other services
A second key area of third-party development is the mashup, a tool combining data from multiple systems. The Facebook application publishes the most recent tweet in a profile panel, but doesn’t push status messages back the other way. Likewise, WordPress plug-ins exist to incorporate Twitter content into a blog, or convert posts into a 140-character announcement. Tweets have been combined with Flickr photos and video to add annotation value to multimedia. Treader allows annotation of a link from Google Reader when posting it to Twitter. GChat and sync with Adium have integrated Twitter to allow changes to the IM away status messages. Second Life, the 3D metaverse, has been known to turn tweet content into avatar t-shirts and bubbles from a virtual fountain.
Returning to the publication focus, Jott and SpinVox have mashups that allow voice to be converted into tweets. This is potentially a powerful way to bring less technical users into the Twitter community, since after the initial setup only a phone is needed. Efforts to streamline publication to information streams have resulted in tools to post to Twitter and Jaiku in one message.
Mashups allow Twitter to benefit from existing or emerging communities offering different rewards for membership without having to build them in-house. This lowers the barrier to entry for anyone already in those other communities, at the same time exposing those users to a host of other social systems use Twitter as a bridge.
Facilitating work and play
Twitter helps people be productive, both as a function of work and in exploring a greater social context. It has been mashed with a 30Boxes calendar and del.icio.us bookmarks to streamline the bookkeeping process and avoid double entries. Twitter Timer integrates task reminders with Google tools, and Remember the Milk—a wonderful to-do list service—facilitates commands to send and retrieve items through Twitter direct messages. Some developers have even found ways to convert the information stream into a database.
New services are showing up every day, some of which call out for Twitter integration. MyGADS, for example, is a shared spreadsheet that permits simple natural language-ish querying from IM, cell phones and the web site. Twitter could easily be implemented as a means of connecting to that service.
One of the simplest and most useful third-party applications is twitterfeed. This RSS parser will accept feeds from any XML source—such as Facebook status messages, blogs, or other information streams—and automatically convert the newest information into a tweet. The web tool also allows some customization in shaping the tweet. Twitterfeed is a popular tool, accounting for about 3% of all tweets in the public stream. (It should be noted that Jaiku, a Twitter competitor, doesn’t need this kind of external support since there is a built in feed manager as part of the user profile.)
Some applications help get a pulse on the community. A great recent addition is Twitigg, a Digg-like data mining site that keeps track of how often links are posted as tweets. This is a particularly useful aggregation given that most people don’t follow the public timeline and those who do don’t have a way to see how information repeats. Polls and micro-memes are also popping up in the form of third-party tools. Twitteria is a web site that separates discussions into different buckets, each with a riff on the standard Twitter mantra, “What are you doing?” Users answer the distinct questions through the website and follow one of the 19 discussion streams as a reply. PlusPlusBot works in the opposite direction, with tweets of followers being parsed and aggregated to gauge opinions about topics of interest.
TwitterWhere extracts tweets based on a geographic location, as determined by self-disclosed information in the user profiles. Other data mining requires some extra help from the author. Twibble allows GPS information about a twitterer’s location to be included as part of the tweet and then parsed into a map. In order to get that location information, though, the author has to be using a phone with Twibble installed. That creates a need for sub-community building within the greater Twitter community before the data mining can be very useful.
Finally, on the playful side are the Twitter equivalent of Facebook Food Fights or Zombie-Vampire wars. Post Like a Pirate will convert your normal tweet into a scurvy pirate message, complete with a lot of “matey” an “arrgh” added to the post. Foamee keeps track of the promise of future beer. Tweet your foamee pledges to another twitter user, and go to the web site to collect and manage your virtual bar tab.