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Yahoo embracing Twitter?
Sunday, August 23, 2009 by Dave Winer.
Silicon Alley Insider has an interesting piece about Yahoo's obsession with all-things-Twitter. And at the end they have an even more interesting strategy. "Yahoo should work to be a better place to use Twitter than Twitter.com." 
This sounds a lot like the winning strategy Yahoo used to best CNN and MSNBC in web news in the 2004 timeframe. With My Yahoo they became the place to go to find out what's new on CNN and MSNBC, and of course on Yahoo.
This kind of embrace is a perfect prelude to competing with Twitter. First, develop a base of people who use Yahoo as their interface for Twitter, and then gradually add features that only work Yahoo-to-Yahoo.
Twitter could add those features too of course, but they might not, since they believe (incorrectly, imho) that the 140 character limit and URL-shortening are part of the magic of Twitter.
Yahoo, or anyone else who adopted this approach, could capture the users who would like to have a bit more space to express their ideas.
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Dave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer
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.Last update: 8/23/2009; 8:39:46 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
