Thanks for the information! I didn't know that about Mercola or I wouldn't have posted in the first place. I should have done some background research though. It seemed like he was talking about a genuine contradiction that I thought was troubling.
As a developer, I would love to see this get more traction. I really would.
It's really painful working with Twitter now. Twitter's display 'requirements' and other aspects of the API are super restrictive after their latest update.
However, the sad truth is that the population of Twitter users isn't going to be shifting anywhere else anytime soon. Most users hardly care about the 'openness' of the platform. I imagine the best way for a competitor to succeed would be by allowing users to cross post statuses to Twitter.. but Twitter API restrictions would kick in there too!
I agree, I don't see how implementing the same thing as Twitter but with missing features (like posting via SMS) is supposed to draw away Joe Everyuser.
The reason Twitter is popular is because there's a large active community of users and they do a good job of enabling you to discover and follow people you're likely to be interested in. It doesn't really matter how "open" it is, any more than it matters if Facebook or Tumblr are open.
WordPress works with a distributed "install it yourself" model because people use it to power their websites and they want configurability and extensibility. With social networks like Twitter, they want community and baked in support with devices and other services.
rstat.us does let you cross-post statuses to Twitter. And most of the API restrictions have limited reading, not writing, so this feature may be safe for some time.
It's a real gem, especially for someone who isn't as aesthetically astute, like me. I used it on a couple of websites I've been working on recently. [1][2]
- I've used an exponential decay similar to the one used in HN, except much faster in decaying.
- Only tweets from today are shown.
- The rating of a tweet is determined by 2 factors: the number of retweets and the votes on TweetFad (retweets have a much smaller weight compared to votes).
- Users can add their content by simply including the hashtag '#TwtFad' in their tweets. To submit tweets to a particular category, the users can add #[category_name].
- For each category, I've added some influential twitter accounts and hashtags to monitor for tweets. These are automatically added to the listing if they have a retweet count greater than a threshold.
I would love to hear the comments and suggestions of the HN community. I'm a long time reader of HN, and this community has helped me learn a lot I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone here!
It's incredibly easy for you because you know how facebook works.
The first time I used facebook, I was like whaa? What's a WALL? What's the difference between a post and a note? How is sharing a link specifically different from embedding it in your status?
Lots of complexity there, but we learn it after a while.
People join facebook because all their friends are on it, and they get to see a news feed.
It's not instantly familiar or usable, and no one knows what's a wall or a news feed, but when you find pictures of a friend you haven't seen in 10 years, you'll probably stick around and try to figure it out.
Of course, at the beginning the only users where college students and people in their teens or twenties. But now even people in their forties join just because they can keep in touch with their distant relatives and old friends.
I think people might find some of the statements on the page offensive. Such as the implication that 'real experts' are only found in the west. Or that people from the east work for 'peanuts'. Sure they work for less because they need less to support a decent lifestyle, but that doesn't mean they're working for peanuts.
I realize the intention is good, but there must be another way to get the message out.
