I watched most of yesterday's press announcements about Twitter's new toolkits for developers. I know they can't do everything, but I was surprised that they're more or less leaving the Twitter API as-is, at least based on what I heard yesterday. There are so many people I'd like to gossip with this about, and I know I won't get the chance, so here's a blog post instead.

I develop in JavaScript in the browser and on the server in the node.js environment. Between these two platforms, you need a lot of glue to connect a UI in the browser to services running on twitter.com. It could be a lot simpler, as the JavaScript toolkits from Facebook and Dropbox are, two other services I've adapted to. They do more of the work for you. And they're all missing some of what the others do.

I really want a service that does what all three of them do. Every app needs identity and storage. Not necessarily a lot of storage. A megabyte is a lot of space for an outline, which is basically an XML document. With the amount of space used by a few pictures, something Twitter and Facebook already do for users, without limits, a huge range of interesting apps could be written. Today we have to do that for ourselves. It would be easier for everyone if the platforms did it too.

There's a big void out there, someone should fill it. If Twitter had it would have made 2015 a more interesting year, imho.