Ever since Medium was founded in 2012, I was afraid they were going to do to writing what YouTube did to video, what Twitter did to short outbursts. Medium is a nice product, but it was too strong, and too much of a silo.#
If Medium didn't exist I'd have the same fear about Substack, but they are there to keep each other from dominating. And I still hope a more distributed approach appears, esp since running a server these days is getting much easier and cheaper and is only going to get more so.#
I wonder why Medium hasn't directly competed with Substack. It isn't that hard to ad email subscriptions to a product like Medium. Have they done it and I missed it? I would have thought it would be automatic.#
Similarly with Clubhouse. A bit of a juggernaut. I tried it, was briefly addicted, and then for some reason I lost interest. It was a time-filler, like Twitter is, for example. When I reach a milestone in other work, I take a break by checking out Twitter. You can't do that with Clubhouse. There is no 15 minute Clubhouse break. It's either a few seconds, or an hour. I don't usually have an hour in the middle of the day to goof off, and at night I'm not at the computer and in need of distraction.#
Now Twitter is going where Clubhouse is. I'll try it. I think it has a chance because Twitter and Clubhouse really should be more integrated. And Twitter itself doesn't live with the limits outside devs have. They can create connections we can't.#
The world somehow has missed that Twitter has a great API, and it runs fast, and they are expanding it, not contracting it. Briefly, when Dick Costolo was CEO, they made a mistake that they quickly corrected, by cutting off certain (but not all) external devs.#
Since then they've been very liberal and reliable. I love using the Twitter API. Of course I would love it even more if they got rid of the 280 char limit. I'm usually good at figuring out angles on things in tech, but I have never seen the logic behind this limit, when they allow so many other much more complex data types to be attached to tweets. I would have thought given all their other payload types that by now they would have a 64K or greater limit to the amount of text attached to a tweet#
Last update: Thursday March 11, 2021; 9:05 PM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)