NY Times on Twitter 

Okay, I got the bugs worked out, and it seems to work, fingers crossed, praise Murhpy, I am not a lawyer and I don't work for the NY Times.

http://twitter.com/nyt

It's set to post one new story per minute, as long as they are available. I may decrease that to once every three minutes or every five minutes. I'm interested in what people think.

"All the news that's fit to twit."

How important it is for publications and publishing platforms to be open. Because Twitter has a public API that allows anyone to add a feature, and because the NY Times offers its content as a set of feeds, I was able to whip up a connection between the two in a few hours. That's the power of open APIs.

Rex Hammock: "Hey, Twitter is a newsreader."

Don Park: "There he goes again."

Link of the day 

A new feature! When Today's Links would only have one item, we give an award to the one link that made a Links section necessary. The first such honor goes to Mary Hodder.

Mary Hodder: "Cingular == evil." Concise.

Microsoft in it to win? 

I see Scoble is up pretty late too.

I had this thought when I read that Microsoft is "in it to win," even before I read Scoble's essay.

I'm a fan of Deal or No Deal. I know it's a stupid show, and that's why I like it.

I can't believe the misplaced arrogance of some of the contestants. Last night I saw a guy who had one big number left on the board decide to go for it. The box he opened of course was the big number. So he went from having an offer on the table of $40K to $1K in a single move. That's okay, I'm still going to win, he says. His family backs him up.

Okay, what else is he supposed to say, you might ask? Well, good question.

He should be saying "My it's nice to have made $40K for 25 minutes worth of work."

In other words, when you boast of how smart you are, when smarts has nothing to do with winning or losing, you look pretty fcuking dumb.

Microsoft isn't in it to win because Microsoft can't win, any more than the guy with just one big number on the board can. Sure there's a infinitesmal sliver of hope, but not enough to bet your future on.

I don't know what I'd say if I were Microsoft now. I would try to divest in the system that produced Vista as much as I possibly could. When a big tree falls, it creates room for new growth. It takes a long time for a tree the size of Microsoft to fall on its own. And it's very hard for an exec at such a company to make big parts of it fall before they have to.

That's why IBM was the last of the Big Iron companies to collapse after the advent of the fractional horsepower computer (aka the PC). They were the biggest, so they had the furthest to fall. Microsoft is in the unenviable position of being the IBM of our age.

Programming Twitter at 4AM 

I guess the next step in my exploration is to program a simple app that uses the Twitter API. And just like the old days, in the 70s, I'm up in the middle of the night because that's when the system is fast enough to actually get some work done.

During the day, Twitter is very slow. As a user this is somewhat workable, but if you're developing an app, it's excruciating. And it's possible that my app might not function at all when the system is overloaded. I'm feeling this stuff out. Any help from someone experienced at developing on Twitter would be much appreciated.

Okay, I don't want to announce what I'm trying to create, because I might not be able to get it to work, and then there will be users who will be disappointed when I turn the thing off (that never really worked). But in general, it's a newsbot. I'm sure a lot of other people are doing these, it's kind of an obvious thing to try, right?

Anyway, I'm wondering if Twitter keeps you from posting too frequently and if so, what's the maximum rate you can post? I'm finding that after doing some work, the connection closes as I'm waiting for a response. It could be that I'm being throttled, or it could be that the server is having problems even in the middle of the night, even when the web UI is fast.

If you have any insight, please post a comment.

WSJ head buried in sand? 

This WSJ article reminds me of the early articles in MSM about blogging. I wonder if any programmers at the WSJ are experimenting with newsbots for Twitter (see above) or if they're just burying their heads in the sand.

At the very least this is a good sandbox for experimentation. As I said yesterday, what matters is that there are users. I wonder if they'll ever figure this out, that when they dis something that people like, they're losing the respect of those people.

They really make Tara Hunt sound like a b*tch. I know enough to make a distinction between sounding like one when passed through their filters and actually being one.