David John Mead

Is this the end of Twitter as we know it?

As a reader of Simon Willison’s blog, I came across this tool that he created with Natalie Downe – Tweetersation.

Now this tool lets you combine peoples conversations on Twitter in one time line.  Pretty cool.  So I can now just enter a few peoples names or id’s and I can see the whole conversation I caught the tail end of.

How does this fit with the title? Well, more and more I’m seeing Twitter being absorbed into or used by other tools/applications.  Most Web2.0 social sites let you post to or display from Twitter.  Other people are building tools to show the mood, locale, to search and monitor, and general pull or push whatever they can through the API.

So is that what Titter should resolve itself to be – Just an API to hang communication on?  Maybe that could be it’s business model.  How many people are actually logging in to the Twitter website as opposed to using it through something like HelloTxt or their phone, Snitter, Flock or Twhirl.

As netizens shift from shiny object to shiny object I believe Twitter will still be there.  I just don’t think we’ll be as aware of it’s presence as we are now.  It’ll just be that thing we use to communicate.

Technorati tags: twitter, api, future

It’s all about sharing your content…

With the rumor mill humming with “all-you-can-hear iTunes for $130” I think NPR’s announcement slipped under my radar.

NPR has implemented an API which will give you access to audio, text and images from their archive, dating back to 1995. Now a fair bit is still off-limits (Fresh Air, Radio Labs) probably due to it being owned by sources other than NPR, this is still a great for the web-troika crowd, where aggregation is the big thing.

• Companies could search and re-publish stories that mention them
• Organizations and causes have access to a wealth of relevant content that can be served up through widgets
• Individuals could create their own RSS feeds

They seem to have some documentation covering their own NPRML, but they can also return RSS, JSON, etc.  I’m looking forward to some of this great content resurfacing in the most unlikely of places.

Blogged with Flock

Technorati tags: api, npr, webtroika