Tim Gregory » Twitter

Google Buzz feels like the old-fashioned Internet (in a good way)

Tim — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:48:39 +0000

I’ve been dipping in to Google Buzz evey day or so since it was released, and so far I really like it.

Like it enough to say that I can’t see myself using Twitter anymore, and suspect Twitter has hit a wall in terms of growth.

Things I like about it:

Conversations are persistant, not fleeting
Integrated into Gmail, which I usually have open
Easy to take a Buzz conversation private into email, or to fire off a Google Talk session
No 140 character limit!

The last one, the 140-character thing, is a bigger deal than I thought it would be. After using Buzz, I’ve realised how stilted, unnatural, and uncomfortable it is to communicate in single sentences through Twitter. Twitter is great for blasting out short snippets to nobody in particular, but as a medium for conversation it’s pretty ineffective.

I’ve watched posts made to both Twitter and Buzz, and there is no doubt in my mind that the response from Buzz is of a higher quality.

Here’s a great example of the return to the lost art of conversations with strangers on the Net -a Buzz thread started by a Twitter post made by Clay Shirky

In the thread, Clay responds to one of his commenters, prompting the following comment:

Wow, this thread is so different from anything you’d ever encounter on Twitter or FB. Kind of feels like the early days of the internet in a weird way: everyone in a chat room talking to people they don’t know about lofty things, in long paragraphs. Who does that on the web any more?

The comment encapsulated the feel completely – it’s taken us this long to get back to the immediacy and spirit of old tools like IRC!

Twitter – conversation or not?

Farmville vs. Twitter

Tim — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:35:43 +0000

Being a bit of a Twitter skeptic in spite of trying to use it daily for a while, I enjoyed seeing this post on Mashable showing that Farmville is bigger than Twitter.

I find it really funny that a fairly pointless farm simulation game has had much more rapid growth than the service that the founders thought would grow to 1 billion users and become the pulse of the planet.

They went as far as asking whether they were “building a new internet”.
I don’t think anyone playing Farmville thinks they are building a new agricultural industry.

Retweet Beta

Tim — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:12:16 +0000

I’m not exactly a prolific Twitter user these days, but I logged in today and for some reason I’ve been added to the new “Retweet” interface beta.
The welcome message looks like this:

There’s some more information about this feature on the the Twitter Blog.
For what it’s worth, Techcrunch thinks that Twitter growth is flat-lining
, while classic blogging is picking up momentum again. Could it be that Twitter’s “one trick pony” approach is running out of steam and they need to focus on adding features now?

Hot topics for 2009 – Realtime Web

Tim Gregory — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:11:55 +0000

Ok, this one is pretty obvious… you would have to be living in a cave high in the mountains and out of earshot of any internet-using humans to have missed the seismic shift from ‘kinda fresh’ to real-time on the internet.
This is big, really big, and it’s particularly interesting to me that it’s an area that seems to be a bit of a weak spot for Google and until recently some of the other giants like Facebook.
I’d go as far as saying that Twitter is not that interesting by itself, and it is really riding the realtime meme.
Twitter was in the right place at the right time, and pitched itself in the right way -the technology is not particularly interesting, and has existed in various forms for years.

Take a look at this timeline of the spread of news regarding Michael Jackson’s death from SEOMoz.

It took over an hour for a large entertainment site to break the news of the cardiac arrest (TMZ.com).
Another 42 minutes for Wikipedia to pick it up.
A further 18 minutes before CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital (meanwhile, TMZ had posted news of his death)
15 minutes after the CNNbrk tweet, Wikipedia freezes the Michael Jackson page after a flurry of edits.
A total of 2 hours after the 911 call, the TMZ story goes big on Digg
By this stage, there are over 2000 mentions per minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter
At 22:40, a full 3 hours after the 911 call, the first mention of Michael Jackson’s death make it onto Google News.

Not hard to see a pattern here… Twitter, Wikipedia, Digg… mainstream news and the mighty Google were slow out of the blocks compared to the social sites.

I won’t bore you with too many links and details, but here’s a quick scan over the topic…

The realtime web is being built on XMPP, the ‘jabber’ protocol.

Everyone is starting to use XMPP, including Google (for Wave), Apple (for iPhone push notification), Twitter (for feeds to Twitter search and a couple of others) and Facebook (promised soon for their chat).

The major IM networks are starting to ‘get it’, and AOL now talks XMPP.

XMPP has loads of great stuff built in, like presence, personal eventing, multi-user chat, federated authentication, publish/subscribe functionality and loads more.

The bridge between the web and XMPP is BOSH.

The development pattern is called Comet , and typically uses the long-polling technique. Holding connections open is better than polling – the latency is lower, and total overhead is lighter.

BOSH and XMPP are typically used in web-based IM clients, but some clever engineers are re-purposing XMPP for multi-player games at sites like Chesspark.

Realtime search is becoming a hot topic, particularly at Techcrunch.

Realtime search is the beginning – I can see us using this at 24.com for content syndication, real-time Sport scoring, multi-player games and a couple of other (top sikrit) apps.

In fact, one of my greatest fears for our organisation right now is that we wake up too late and find ourselves in a 2D Roger Rabbit version of the internet that is NOT realtime.