#newtwitter, Diaspora and the future of the Social Web

On Tuesday, Twitter unveiled their new interface for Twitter.com which now embeds content from Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube and others. I think it's an attempt to make Twitter more compelling for casual users and is something we have done in FriendBinder for a while now. It also has the effect of destroying some the advantages that 3rd party clients have had, especially the Twitter-only clients. This is ironic, since I believe that Twitter wants Twitter-only clients to continue to exist. Twitter has also started to take control of it's own platform by producing iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry clients itself. Twitter has also taken sharing buttons in house. In fact the main differentiation you get from Twitter is to support multiple networks as it's likely Twitter won't do that themselves in their clients.

Facebook has been relatively closed until the last year, choosing instead to have it's platform mostly built inside Facebook.com. It wasn't until last year that Facebook really became open enough for true 3rd party clients and we were so excited we had it working the next day. Facebook, however, has it's own iPhone client and most users still use facebook.com, so in general prefers to control that direction just like Twitter is starting to.

What's clear about these moves, is that Facebook and even Twitter are trying to keep their garden's pretty walled for now. If Twitter or Facebook make an official version of an application, then the theory is that no one else will be able to get enough market share to compete and make a viable business. Jason Calacanis for example calls out Facebook based businesses because Facebook will absorb the features into it's own system. He also has made numerous comments stating, that you shouldn't build a startup based on a single ecosystem, because it's very risky and he is not alone in this point of view.

Diaspora released it's initial code yesterday and they say they want to be a more privacy aware Facebook. The problem Diaspora has is, how to break into Twitter's and Facebook ecosystems? It's not 2006 anymore, people have picked their primary social networks (for now) and are starting to settle on the tools they use with them and there are vast number for both. Many people for example use only Facebook.com and the Facebook iphone client to access Facebook. Even with Twitter some of the most popular clients: Echofon, Twitterific and Twitter's own apps. are Twitter-only.

Diaspora needs to do two things in order to get real traction:
- Get into multiple network clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, Gwibber, FriendBinder and others.
- Provide something it's competitors don't and preferably won't

So what's next? there are already many social networks and multi-network clients can only realistically support so many if they all have different APIs, and those will be the biggest ones typically. Activity Streams, is one solution to this. Activity Streams is an extension of the Atom standard to provide social context to feeds and there are many related standards to provide the glue for this to work, OAuth and PubSubHubbub for example. If social networks and clients all supported Activity Streams it would be easier for people to get access to brand new social networks in the clients they use.

I, like Alex Payne, think we need to move to a model like email with multiple providers and clients. Currently Twitter and Facebook are like Gmail and Yahoo mail in this model and clients like Tweetdeck and Friendbinder are equivalent to Thunderbird/Apple Mail and other IMAP clients. This already has happened in the past with instant messaging, there are several protocols, but clients like Pidgin, iChat and Trillian support the main sites and the standard, XMPP.

I don't think we are far from an open model, but to get there we need everyone who's not Twitter and Facebook to support Activity Streams and users to support multiple network clients.

Geolocation, Retweets and more...

Twitter last week updated their API with two new features, geolocation and retweets. We now have initial support of these in FriendBinder.

GeoLocation

If geolocation is available on a tweet you will see a map link which expands to something like the above Goolge Map and you can pan and zoom on it. We are also doing the same for Flickr content that is geotagged.


You can also send a tweet with a location on it. You will need to turn the feature on in your Twitter account settings and turn it on in FriendBinder in settings also. We've tested this on the iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0, Firefox 3.5 and it should work on anything that supports the W3C's Geolocation API.

Retweets

We have supported retweets in FriendBinder for a long time now, however one problem with it, was that you would often have to shorten the original message in order to be able to retweet it. With Twitter's new native retweet feature this is no long necessary and it's a simple two clicks to retweet anything.

and more...

We now support playing of YouTube, Facebook, Flickr videos inline in FriendBinder so you don't have to leave the site to view them. This also works for YouTube and Qik videos posted on Twitter. Videos open in a lightbox similar to what we do with photos.

If there are any problems let us know in the comments or on Get Satisfaction

Threaded Twitter Conversations

We've added a feature to show you conversations from your friends, it's pretty simple as you can see from the screenshot. You can reply to any part of the conversation.

New Twitter Features in FriendBinder

We have added a number of small features to improve experience of using Twitter on FriendBinder. They are all additions to the "stream" page.

We have changed the "reply" and "re-tweet" feature so can now reply inline without navigating away from the page:
We have add a search replies link, which again works inline, that tries to find replies to the twitter message from everyone (not just your friends).


We can also find the message that someone replied to (though this working depends on their client having been updated with the feature)
and finally, we have implemented inline viewing of pictures from TwitPic, Twitgoo, yfrog, pix.im and img.ly.
Please let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions on how we can improve FriendBinder.

Changes to Twitter support

As you may be aware, Twitter have now introduced per-IP limits on their API (Louis Gray has the details), this affects us in a number of ways.

Previously you were able to add Twitter as a network without giving your password to us (and this was the only option for a little while), however, this is now no longer possible due to this change in the Twitter API. Twitter will now will require authentication before you can use it. Currently the only method of authentication for Twitter is a password (Twitter say they are working on supporting oAuth in future).

We now fetch all Twitter information using your username/password and this counts against your per-user limit of 100/requests per hour (currently) and this limit is shared with other sites that also take your Twitter username and password.

We are looking at ways we can enable users to follow a handful of users if you don't have a Twitter account.