Tweetree, day 3

Monday, December 29, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I'm still very impressed with the service and the team. 

1. They've implemented the client side of the thumbnail code I inserted into my AFP pictures site, so now when I post one of those pictures to Twitter, they read the HTML source, find the link to the thumbnail and display that inline. Twitter only displays the URL. The user must click on the link to see the picture.  

Here's the A-B comparison: Twitter vs Tweetree. One less step to find out whether it's a picture, movie or song, no delay, no context shift. To me, he difference is as striking as the difference between a command-line-based and graphic operating systems. Is it really simpler to make the user do work the computer could do for the user?  

2. In the comments on my post here, and their blog post, came news of a more sophisticated dynamic web service specified by Flickr and supported by Hulu for including previews of their content in sites like Tweetree. This was very forward-looking of them, and we're going to try to make use of it. Everyone in this space already has glue for YouTube, but that's not good enough. There are many other video sites out there, including Scoble's -- who volunteered to go first with this, whose videos should be part of this new kind of blogging, but for whom a one-off just isn't practical.  

3. Also in the comments, an observation that the HTML <link> element is flexible enough to do what we want, and there may be problems with including namespaced elements in HTML. I'm not convinced anything would break if we continued with the current approach, but so far the only ones implementing this format, as far as I know, are scripting.com and tweetree.com, so it's still possible to change. 

4. I've made a number of feature requests of the Tweetree team in the last 24 hours, and they've responded very well, even implementing some of the easy quick-hits. Most important, they now have an item-level permalink, so I can demonstrate the difference between a tweet as viewed through Twitter and through Tweetree. (See #1 above.) 

5. My main focus is on the inline media features, not the threading. I think the service is being confused with tools whose purpose is to impose conversation on Twitter -- I don't think Twitter is about conversation, I see it as a publishing environment, like blogging. I'm going to encourage them to shift the emphasis to graphics, video, audio and other media types, and building out from there. There's lots of fertile ground there that isn't being well tended by their competitors, lots of opportunity, imho.