TWITTERGRAMS: TALKING TWEETS
Dave Winer has released a cool experiment into the world: Twittergram. It's a voice version of Twitter (more coverage): You record a brief audio clip (200K max), and Twittergram puts it on a server and creates a Twitter post (a "tweet") that links to it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-debate about what Twitter is and who builds it. In March 2007, Dave Winer himself asked how basic Twitter really is, and commentary since has criticized its unusually slow feature cadence while upgrades land at rivals Jaiku, Facebook, and Pownce — even as a commentator argued on July 5 that Twitter beats Pownce precisely because of its stronger API.
First-order effects
- Winer's TwitterGram lets users record brief audio clips (200K max) that are hosted and posted as linked tweets, adding voice to Twitter without Twitter itself shipping anything.
- Tweets can now be phoned in through the service, so posting no longer requires typing at all.
Second-order effects
- Pownce and Jaiku, which critics already credit with outpacing Twitter on features, now compete against an extensible-by-third-parties model where outside developers like Winer fill Twitter's functional gaps for free.
- With Twitter newly venture-funded per its spring 2007 raise, third-party tools like this raise the question of whether the company formalizes or crowds out the ecosystem forming around its API.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, microblogging platforms will be judged less by their own release schedules than by the developer ecosystems their APIs enable — the API becoming the product roadmap.
The trend: Microblogging in 2007 is evolving into a platform contest, where open APIs let third-party developers like Dave Winer define features faster than the core services themselves.