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Tumblr and the Twitter API, day 2

Friday, December 18, 2009 by Dave Winer.

It'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. 

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.  

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. 

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. 

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.