5 ms·

Blogs existed well before twitter. Blogging also sends messages to nowhere.

gojomo 16y ago
Not guaranteed-short messages, collected in a merged timeline, with interruption (via SMS delivery) as a common/easy option. There is a dimension on which blogging and Twitter are similar. That's why they share a row in the table! But the added constraint, and the possibilities unleashed by that constraint, are a crucial part of Twitter's success.
- zmmmmm 16y ago
  Blogs themselves aren't short but the RSS feeds for them usually are. Blogs + RSS roughly equals Blog + Twitter with link but for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom Part of the reason is sitting right there in this sentence. You can't even bring yourself to call RSS "RSS", because the so-called "standard" has more forks than the devil's toolshed. But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized. Twitter, on the other hand, is a protocol designed to be read and written directly by humans. It excludes all the ugly, verbose, oft-redundant tags and just delivers a message, which may contain an arbitrary number of #hashtags, @addresses, URLs, and blither in whatever order seems appropriate. The result feels human, instead of like the homework from a 1978 class on data processing. And it's really malleable: To invent a new way of Twittering all you have to do is type something and hope that enough of the audience can figure it out.
    - zmmmmm 16y ago
      > But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized Not really sure why you say that. RSS was pretty successful for a while - successful enough to get built into every browser and most email clients. End user consumers never saw the XML and the publishing side was usually built into blog software so neither did the publishers. I think this is not so much about XML but rather a more generic notion of simplicity - the whole concept of Twitter is so brain dead simple that it removes nearly all friction in adopting it. It's a much more general simplicity than just the encoding.
rwmj 16y ago
I assumed he was talking about tumblr, which is (I am told) a short, multimedia-rich blog service.

Not guaranteed-short messages, collected in a merged timeline, with interruption (via SMS delivery) as a common/easy option. There is a dimension on which blogging and Twitter are similar. That's why they share a row in the table! But the added constraint, and the possibilities unleashed by that constraint, are a crucial part of Twitter's success.

zmmmmm 16y ago
Blogs themselves aren't short but the RSS feeds for them usually are. Blogs + RSS roughly equals Blog + Twitter with link but for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom Part of the reason is sitting right there in this sentence. You can't even bring yourself to call RSS "RSS", because the so-called "standard" has more forks than the devil's toolshed. But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized. Twitter, on the other hand, is a protocol designed to be read and written directly by humans. It excludes all the ugly, verbose, oft-redundant tags and just delivers a message, which may contain an arbitrary number of #hashtags, @addresses, URLs, and blither in whatever order seems appropriate. The result feels human, instead of like the homework from a 1978 class on data processing. And it's really malleable: To invent a new way of Twittering all you have to do is type something and hope that enough of the audience can figure it out.
  - zmmmmm 16y ago
    > But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized Not really sure why you say that. RSS was pretty successful for a while - successful enough to get built into every browser and most email clients. End user consumers never saw the XML and the publishing side was usually built into blog software so neither did the publishers. I think this is not so much about XML but rather a more generic notion of simplicity - the whole concept of Twitter is so brain dead simple that it removes nearly all friction in adopting it. It's a much more general simplicity than just the encoding.

rwmj 16y ago

I assumed he was talking about tumblr, which is (I am told) a short, multimedia-rich blog service.