3rd party apps must make up for Twitter’s incompetence

24 Jul, 2008

3rd party apps must make up for Twitter’s incompetence

Posted by: Al In: Business| Technology| Twitter

With Twitter continuing to be so unreliable, I think third party applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific and possibly FriendFeed(?), just to name a few, need to add the option to keep a local copy of messages and your Following and Followers list. TweetDeck is already ahead of the game as it keep messages in a local database. But, with Twitter’s latest screw up, in which they inadvertently removed people from following others, the ability to have a backup, export or offline copy of your Following list is very important.

Who is up for the challenge?

-Al Degutis

Tags: fail, Twitter

Viewing 3 Comments

sdegutis 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Sounds pretty trivial for a Cocoa programming to do this kind of thing, especially with this Twitter class from a friend. I think I might actually be up to the challenge in the next few months, if I get any spare time.

reply edit reblog flag

1 /people/sdegutis/ /people/sdegutis/following/

Iain Dodsworth 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

TweetDeck also keeps the list of followers in the same database, which is fully accessible offline. A number of people have been using it to recreate their following list before Twitter gets round to fixing it e.g. http://twitter.com/erasrhed42/statuses/867368520 http://twitter.com/abelara/statuses/867307568 http://twitter.com/KevinHazzard/statuses/867494783

You're post makes a great point about how twitter app developers have to add more value than most just to deal with twitter outages and API inconsistencies. I do wonder how long this good will from developers can last.

reply edit reblog flag

http://www.tweetdeck.com

Svetlana Gladkova 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Now I see your point with third-party apps making up for Twitter incompetence. Sure, backup of our data could be a great addition to the services we already use as Twitter clients and I also expect to see some other backup apps intended solely to back up the followers in the nearest few days. But the problem is that they won'tsolve the core problem of Twitter instability - even if you have a backup, you can still import it Twitter only while a better option would be to be able to export the data to other substitute services.

reply edit reblog flag

6 /people/profy/ /people/profy/following/ http://www.profy.com/ 549452742 profy

blog comments powered by Disqus

Jesse Luna: My favorite iPhone Twitter Web site is Hahlo.com.It's full-featured and has a slick design compared to basi
Christopher S. Rollyson: Al, thanks for a very useful summary for me.. I'm looking for an app that will help me view/tweet to multiple accounts, from Powerbook & iPhone
Paulius: HiMy name is Paulius Degutis. I am from Lithuania, Kaunas. Degutis name is from lithuanian word degti, what means to burn :)

Flickr PhotoStream

Al, politely refusing to try my tasty B52

About

Degutis Insights consists of the ramblings of Al and Judy, where we share our thoughts and images from our lives, including family and friends, technology and other miscellaneous topics.

Degutis Insights