Nick Bilton comes up with the right metaphor to describe the Twitter API debacle — it’s a restaurant that gives away its food — but the problem is that he kinda skips over the obvious solution given the metaphor he used. The problem is that Twitter was giving away all of its “food” for others to sell. Really, Twitter should’ve just started charging money to large customers for access to the API, rather than creating its own food trucks. Hootsuite, for example, charges its pro customers money. They can afford to give some of that money to Twitter. The model already works — Amazon does the exact same thing with its cloud service, selling bandwidth and server space by the level of usage — and it would’ve been relatively transparent for consumers. Want faster server refreshes? Pay for the pro service. Instead, Twitter decided to move inward, breaking a model that could’ve worked. And it’s a shame. We love the fried ravioli.
Why has the Facebook app been so slow? Because the current version of the app is nothing more than a web browser inside an Objective-C shell. Stuff is being constantly pulled from the web, hence the lag time.Gizmodo’s Casey Chan • Explaining the main problem with Facebook’s iPhone app — it’s not really a native app, so it’s slow. But this is apparently changing, according to Nick Bilton of the NY Times, who says a fully-native app is coming — and it’s fast.
ohheybill asks: Do you really think it's "awesome" to publicly bash a company and the people who work for it because they didn't allow you to violate FAA regulations? Is that the kind of behavior that Zynga and others (like yourself) should be encouraging?
» SFB says: To put it simply, we think the NYT’s Nick Bilton was onto something when he publicly questioned this policy a couple of weeks ago. Not that regulations should be flaunted flouted all the time, but this is one that particularly makes no sense when the plane is in purgatory before it goes in the air due to a delay. In its own little way, it’s a protest. And on top of that, the people who tweeted about Baldwin getting kicked off the plane also violated the policy. And they weren’t kicked off the plane. So yeah. — Ernie @ SFB
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