I (still) want a toolkit to make twitters

Monday, April 06, 2009 by Dave Winer.

On Wednesday last week I got an invite to visit FriendFeed headquarters on Thurs to see a demo of their new user interface. I declined -- it's a lot of travel from Berkeley to Mountain View, and for a few days advantage, I didn't think it was worth it. 

A number of people including Steve Gillmor, Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington did go, presumably because they care more, and because they live closer. I might have gone if it was a BART ride away in San Francisco. Or if I had a business reason to be there.  

Where I'm at with FF. It's in the chrome of my browser (Firefox) and it's part of my regular rotation, including GMail, Twitter, FOD, Top25. It's where I go during pauses in my daily work to see what's up. I don't leave it open and let my eyes drift over there for a distraction while working on other stuff. If I did, I'd never be able to concentrate. 

Right now, in April 2009, I'm looking for a way out of Twitter. I don't like the way the company is managing it. Reading the tea leaves, which is all I have to go on, it looks like they're either going to become the current day equivalent of a TV network, or acquire or be acquired by a TV network. I might have been interested in this last year, when I was watching MSNBC 12-by-7 (gotta sleep and eat) to keep up on the election news. This year, I never watch the news. I can't even be bothered to watch the Sunday news talk. Too much nonsense, it's all too irrelevant to everything.  

But I still believe in the idea of twitter (note the lowercase) even if I don't like where Twitter™ is taking it. So my number one priority is choice. I want lots of twitters, so the market approximates a Ouija board, so the ideas of a handful of tech icons can't determine our future, but they can influence it. Big diff. That's my roadmap and it's not the same road that Ev, Biz et al are on. If FriendFeed wanted to get on that road, I'd be down in Mountain View, or Bumfuck, Egypt, with bells on, at my expense, yesterday. To see another iteration of their creation, that's as irrelevant as Olbermann. I just don't frakin care. 

I still want a toolkit to make twitters, so we can try out lots of ideas without having to build and run a back-end. Given the state of the economy, it's pretty clear not many people are going to get the chance to build one, and Bret and Paul know how to, and I wish they'd swallow their pride, and get to work on the ultimate twitter toolkit. 

There's still a chance that's what they're doing, as far as I know they haven't revealed any changes to the API to go with the UI changes. When they do I'll probably have more to say.