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I wonder how many HN posts have been made about replacing twitter? Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for

I wonder how many HN posts have been made about replacing twitter? Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.

__derek__ 10y ago
> Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people. Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't that ahistorical? Maybe it had that effect. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that that was the intent, though.
enraged_camel 10y ago
>>Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit. And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed. The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
- Fuzzwah 10y ago
  >> No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit. No, it was a group messaging app which used SMS as the transmission method. Hence the character limit.
nindwen 10y ago
> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  You'd also get twitter-like outages as 10k people all try to fetch the RSS from $semifamous at the same time. Or you get people burning their mobile data trying to fetch 2k RSS feeds multiple times per day. Or [any one of umpteen other problems people don't consider when proposing this solution].

I wonder how many HN posts have been made about replacing twitter? Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.

__derek__ 10y ago

> Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people. Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't that ahistorical? Maybe it had that effect. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that that was the intent, though.

enraged_camel 10y ago

>>Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit. And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed. The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.

Fuzzwah 10y ago
>> No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit. No, it was a group messaging app which used SMS as the transmission method. Hence the character limit.

nindwen 10y ago

> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.

zimpenfish 10y ago
You'd also get twitter-like outages as 10k people all try to fetch the RSS from $semifamous at the same time. Or you get people burning their mobile data trying to fetch 2k RSS feeds multiple times per day. Or [any one of umpteen other problems people don't consider when proposing this solution].