Rubénerd!

<old man voice>

When I first started using Twitter in early 2007, I had a dozen or so followers, followed a dozen or so people back, and my Twitterrific client was so quiet it just sat dutifully in the corner of my screen updating only every few minutes or so (pictured above).

Its been a few years since then, and now I follow hundreds of people. I have complex lists to keep track of people, news sources, organisations and current topic searches, and my TweetDeck client has its own widescreen monitor. It has completely replaced any remaining TV news I used to watch, half of the email I write, and a substantial portion of Google Reader/Bloglines reading.

In the beginning, just as with virtually other site since the dawn of [WWW] time, we've been the early adopters, and it always works the same way:

1. We're enthralled with a new underground site
2. All our nerd friends and the likes of Leo Laporte use it. We're the base.
3. It gains more public attention. Lady Gaga starts using it.
4. General public becomes the base, nerds relegated to fringe case power users
5. Site changes to accommodate general public to the detriment of nerds
6. The nerds move on

We're at number 5 right now. We nerds want greater access to the API, we want to access more than just 3000 or so tweets into our history. We want more sophisticated Twitter clients with more features. We want open access. It won't happen.

We're not the users they care about any more

Unlike some of my nerdy brethren, I haven't kidded myself for one moment that I'm a typical user, at least not any more. I continue to read report after report that loudly proclaim it was third party Twitter clients that handed Twitter success, but I've yet to see any evidence to back up these claims outside a "nerd core" of users.

Twitter client developers have much to be proud of, and certainly many of us use their software, but nurturing them is allegedly no longer justifiable to Twitter. As Microsoft did with AV software to Symantec and the like, Twitter wants people to use their clients, and will use their competitive advantage to offer new features faster than outside developers can.

Free and open source software proponents developers like to think that people will choose freedom if given the choice (and perhaps 75% of the time, I do), but in the real world people need more than a philosophy or ideological position to make a shift from an existing application or service that otherwise works for them.

Identi.ca and its StatusNet software has long been a free alternative to Twitter, but has failed to gain much traction at all. Perhaps this latest move by Twitter will give people another reason to use it. The next step will be when all my friends are on it... and that might not be for a long time yet.

ASIDE: Now with a super duper spiffy pretty diagram thing!

One of the things I most often read in regards to Twitter in it's early days was how it was going to destroy blogging as we know it, and as of 2009 I still come across people issuing similar gloom and doom scenarios. People were posting to their blogs less because Twitter was commanding their attention more and as a consequence the only direction for blogs to go was down. It was like taking a graph showing a trend for five months and extending it using the exact same gradient curve for five years.

There is an element of truth to the idea that Twitter has displaced some blogging, but I believe it has had more to do with the spontaneous, real time nature of Twitter than a flaw with blogging. With Twitter I can post what's going on right at that instant whether it be through a snippet of 140 characters, or a photo I just took with my iTelephone, or a link to an interesting article. This means blogs stop being real time life streams and instead become the places where we hash out ideas in more detail and invite more serious discussion, while using Twitter as a reference to when we had the original idea.

By having my friends on Twitter I've also noticed far more traffic to posts that I link to on it compared to if I just posted it here and left it at that. According to my server logs, Twitter is behind only Google services in originating traffic!

Twitter and blogging support each other. In a few years when everyone has got sick of Twitter and moved onto the next fad I suspect there will still be brief idea posting services for this very reason. Will it be FriendFeed? Identica or Laconica? Or even a service like Tumblr that merges the best of both worlds?

One thing is for certain, Twitter isn't killing blogs. Except perhaps the ones that only served as avenues to discuss what particular sandwich you were eating at any one time. Say, a grilled cheese sandwich. In that case, Twitter is more efficient for this any way.

Soup welcome and import page for Pownce users

Sorry for the downright awful heading, it was the best I could come up with having not slept for 48 hours. You know how it is.

I've been telling friends stranded in lifeboats with their exported data after the sinking of Pownce (all three of them!) to grab themselves a Twitter account, add me and join in the never ending fun conversations. Unfortunately as far as I know Twitter doesn't include an option to import previous messages you might have exported from Pownce. If it were me I wouldn't mind, I talk far too much anyway... this is an undisputed fact. Why even these last two sentences have been completely superfluous and unnecessary. Make that the last three sentences.

An alternative is the alternative rich microblogging site Soup.io which has created an import feature specifically for former Powncers. From their Updates account:

Last week, Pownce surprisingly gave their users two weeks notice – they're shutting down the service on December 15 after having being acquired by SixApart.
We've built this migration tool to offer abandoned Powncers a new home. We even added another post type to be able to properly import everything.

Their easy to remember http://www.soup.io/pownce page has the importer. As far as I can tell, you don't even need to be logged in or have an account at all, pretty nice. They're also accepting feedback.

I created a Soup.io account, but as of yet I haven't used it for anything. I absolutely applaud them though for bucking the trend with Web 8.0 businesses or whatever version they're up to yet by using a name that's SPELLED PROPERLY. Even in 1997 I was worried about the name "Rubenerd" being a concatenation of Ruben and Nerd, but at least that's not just misspelled for the sake of being misspelled.

See I think that's why Pownce failed, "Powncers" just doesn't sound as cute as "Twitterers" or "Tweeters". If you're a Soup user, does that make you "Souper duper?". I think I'll soup now. STOP NOW, I meant to say I think I'll stop now. Pownce.