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Tumblr and the Twitter API, day 2

Friday, December 18, 2009 by Dave Winer.

A picture named 2unnel.gifIt's the holiday season, maybe that's why it took a full day for the discussion to get underway about Tumblr's implementation of the Twitter API. But it is rolling now, and going in several interesting directions. Permalink to this paragraph

Fred Wilson, who is a Twitter board member and a major investor in Tumblr, wrote a post on his blog asking for a discussion among his readers, who tend to view the tech world from an investor's perspective.  Permalink to this paragraph

It's great that APIs finally have become an issue for financial people. They're also important for media people because they open doors in the news business as well. In this week's Rebooting The News, Jay asked me to explain what it means for WordPress to implement the Twitter API. The podcast was recorded before we knew that Tumblr was working on matching WordPress. If you're confused by all this michegas, listening to the podcast might help. Permalink to this paragraph

On October 17 I wrote The Internet Abhors a Funnel. In a sense all these new implementations of the Twitter API tend to lessen the importance of teh Funnel. And in addition to strengthening the position of WordPress and Tumblr, it also strengthens Google and Microsoft, because their search engines can become more complete than Twitter's, by making deals with the new players for access to their firehoses. Permalink to this paragraph

Stowe Boyd asks this question from another point of view. How do you follow someone on Tumblr from Twitter and vice versa? I have two answers for that: 1. That further strengthens the position of centralizers, Google and Microsoft. 2. That's what Realtime RSS is for, the concept behind rssCloud and PubSubHubBub. 3. Twitter can and probably still should position itself as the Network Solutions of this space, as I outlined in my 2007 piece that broke Twitter down into its components.  Permalink to this paragraph




 
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A picture named dave.jpgDave 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.

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