<story><title>What Twitter could have been</title><url>http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&quot;One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I think the real problem with this is that Twitter made an even more fundamental mistake early on, which is that they only support text and not data/microformats. That is, there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework in such a way that it automatically gets added to students&apos; dayplanners, no way to list something for sale in a globally searchable way, no way to tweet out a dating profile, etc.&lt;p&gt;Twitter really should have been the company that enabled the semantic web and became the de facto platform powering the entire thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>demachina</author><text>I&apos;m of the school that one of the worst things Twitter could do is add support for data/attachments, long messages or message bloat in general.  The essence of Twitter and its beauty is the messages are short, low overhead and you can skim them very quickly.  It compels people to be brief and to not ramble and that is its value and its a good fit for capacity limited mobile.  Animated GIF&apos;s in Google+ are mostly just annoying.&lt;p&gt;If you need heavy data then you put a link in the mesage and once people establish they are interested in the subject, then they can go to some server to get the heavy content and all the heavy content isn&apos;t centralized at the message service provider.&lt;p&gt;Also storing and transmitting pictures, video and audio on the message bus dramatically increases overhead, cost and risks of running the service.  The second you support it you will have people using it to violate copyrights and laws, you land in a quagmire of shifting standard on what is indecent or illegal in every country in the world.  You end up needing a big staff just to deal with take down requests, subpoena requests and to sift though your fire hose to try to eliminate stuff that is going to offend people.&lt;p&gt;The beauty of short messages is they have very limited capacity to violate laws and copyrights and the message service provider shouldn&apos;t be responsile for what is on the web sites the messages link to.&lt;p&gt;Having integrated image, audio and video support is nice but its actually better if its hosted away from the message bus and decentralized like Twitpic was.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Twitter could have been</title><url>http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&quot;One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I think the real problem with this is that Twitter made an even more fundamental mistake early on, which is that they only support text and not data/microformats. That is, there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework in such a way that it automatically gets added to students&apos; dayplanners, no way to list something for sale in a globally searchable way, no way to tweet out a dating profile, etc.&lt;p&gt;Twitter really should have been the company that enabled the semantic web and became the de facto platform powering the entire thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>conesus</author><text>Seems to me that this isn&apos;t a fundamental mistake but a featureset they could still add now. Not that it&apos;s on the table at Twitter HQ, but I believe that the window of opportunity to give Twitter the ability to read and provide microformats is still here. Existing clients would get the same tweets, but could be easily extended to link to the web to get the &quot;attached&quot; data.&lt;p&gt;Your idea makes me swoon, but I think it&apos;ll never happen because that isn&apos;t the vision Twitter has, not because it&apos;s too late.</text></comment>