As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing most of my blogging on Twitter these days.
Like many, I like how Twitter allows for acceptably-compressed postings. Posting 140 characters as a blog post is too small for most people to find adequate. This is largely because of how long it takes to pull up a blog, versus scanning your Twitter feed. I don’t know about you, but the Great Recession has done a terrific job of making sure I don’t have as much time to blog throughly.
However, Twitter made a promise long ago that they would take an agnostic stance to their API-based applications. Their PR blunders of blocking UberTwitter UberSocial and twidroyd seriously call that into question.
To keep this post short, I won’t re-hash those blunders. To make a long story short, Twitter, sent out massive emails suggesting people use Twitter’s mobile apps… in direct contradiction to their commitment to treat other app providers as equals.
This is on top of Twitter’s end-of-year TOS changes, which added alarming terms (such as, any picture you “post” on Twitter, becomes the property of Twitter, Inc.). They have yet to fully explain what they consider to be a “posting” of a photo on Twitter, or if even linking to a photo hosted elsewhere constitutes grounds for Twitter ownership.
So, I’m going to do what I feared I would have to eventually… and move back to the “old way” of blogging. The good news is, if you don’t like Twitter, you’re going to see a lot more posts.
I’ll still use Twitter, but it’s long-term viability is something I am much more concerned about than before. Twitter is not like AOL Instant Messenger, it is not becoming an open standard. It instead has become something that I am afraid will become more and more controlled, with desperate attempts to monetize added in for effect and flare.