A couple of hours ago, the company’s Michael Sippey writing a blog post about the company’s API which wants to discourage certain types of apps from growing. What types of apps, you ask? Basically, anything described in the upper-right quadrant of this graphic. What types of apps are those? Well …
In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.
That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.
As we pointed out recently, the Twitter alternative App.Net came to being out of reaction to some decisions Twitter was making about the company’s ecosystem. By actively discouraging development of these kinds of apps — stuff that front-facing consumers use — and enforcing limits on the size of developer apps (100,000 users or, if you’re already huge, 200 percent of your current userbase) Twitter may force the hand of certain developers to leave the service. Now, to be clear, Twitter can allow some of these apps to further expand, but based on this document, they may just say no. So to put it simply, if truly innovative things like Storify can’t grow in this model anymore, Twitter encourages them to leave. This is an incredibly poorly-considered decision and will cost them in the long term as a platform.
Among the highlights is a recipe that makes any “like” in Tumblr show up in your Storypad, which makes it as easy to integrate Tumblr posts as you can tweets. We used it pretty heavily when putting together this Oscars liveblog last night.
Consider this our first attempt at doing a Storify. Maybe this’ll suck, but who knows? It might be fun. Shoot us tips, and we’ll be doing updates from Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere as they come in. OSCARS WHOO!!!!
“Whether you’re at a conference or at home … you now have storytelling at your fingertips.” Storify co-founder & CEO Xavier Damman’s totally psyched about bringing his popular online story-telling tool to the iPad. While Storify, which pulls content from a variety of social networks, does not contain all the functionality of it’s Internet-based counterpart, the team at Storify is confident that they’ve successfully migrated the core Storify experience to iOS. The team also added an additional function not found on the Storify website: The ability to tweet, inside the app, while creating a story. Have you tried it yet? source
Why just San Francisco? This seems like a great conversation to have around the country. Great idea by Storify.
As an execution nears, journalism’s focus is appropriately on the specifics of that situation: the crimes and evidence, the families. But a brief mention or count of protesters outside the prison does an injustice to the facts and deeply-held beliefs that belong in a civic discussion of the death penalty. When do journalists give that discussion the time and space it deserves? The Storify below captures the related journalistic issues that arose Wednesday night as Troy Davis faced death.
Why don’t we cover the details of death penalty cases like this? Like, in full? Why does our collective big-media ADD only focus on the moment beforehand? Is it because there are too many cases? Too many stories that deserve our attention more? And where does the debate about the supporters and detractors fit into the whole thing? There are a lot of thoughts to keep in mind about all this, but as a journalistic society, we have selective viewing habits. Instead of focusing on the peak points, why not focus on the 22 years between Davis’ alleged crime and his execution? It’s something this site needs to work on, but it’d be easier if other news outlets took lessons from this.
Copyright 2009-2013 Ernie Smith • Ask us stuff! • E-mail us • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook
