Dave Winer's TwitterGram
Dave Winer likes to throw web services and his own software in a blender and see what comes out, and his new TwitterGram project is a perfect example. In this case, he's married the Twitter API to his own service that allows people to upload short audio messages to their Twitter accounts.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer has spent 2007 poking at what Twitter fundamentally is: he asked on his own blog in March how basic the service should stay, and the BBC gave him a Tech Lab platform in June to lay out his thinking before shipping anything. TwitterGram is the answer in code — a third-party service that uses the Twitter API to attach short audio recordings to tweets.
The launch lands at a charged moment for Twitter. Days earlier, commentators were arguing the service beats rival Pownce precisely because of its stronger API, while also criticizing Twitter's unusually slow development cycle — noting that feature upgrades were landing at Jaiku, Facebook, and Pownce instead. TwitterGram is the live demonstration of both claims: an outsider building the feature the core team hasn't. Webware picked up the story the same day, giving it immediate visibility beyond Winer's own audience.
First-order effects
- Twitter users can now record brief audio clips and have them posted to their accounts as tweets with links — phoned-in blabber, no client work from Twitter required.
- Winer adds another working service to his string of API mashups, built entirely on top of someone else's platform rather than a company product.
Second-order effects
- The launch sharpens the emerging competitive frame against Pownce and Jaiku: Twitter's differentiator is the ecosystem forming around its API, not its own feature velocity — which critics already flagged as lagging behind Facebook and its microblogging rivals.
- Twitter, freshly armed with venture capital per the spring funding reports, faces pressure to decide whether third-party services like TwitterGram are features to absorb, compete with, or leave alone — all while a disclosed security hole from May still raises questions about how much private data the platform exposes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, microblogging platforms will be judged less on what they ship and more on the API surface they expose — with the product effectively co-authored by outside developers like Winer who prototype features faster than the core teams.
- A structural question opens for funded platforms like Twitter: whether the ecosystem layer stays independent, gets absorbed, or is squeezed out once the company has capital to build in-house — the recurring tension of every open-API platform since.
The trend: Microblogging is entering its mashup phase, where a platform's open API lets independent developers like Dave Winer extend the product faster than the funded company behind it can.