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The next twitter API method: account creation

Disclaimer: This post is entirely speculative.  It is also 100% true.

I’ve been playing with Facebook’s new like button recently (you can find it fading in at the bottom of the http://drop.io homepage).  As you probably know, with these new iframe-powered like buttons you can ‘like’ drop.io directly from our site, without interacting with Facebook connect pop-ups (if you’re logged in to fb), and the message that ‘you like drop.io on drop.io’ (there are still some kinks) will float by on your facebook wall.  This is analogous to the @anywhere system that Twitter is/will be rolling out, with the ability to tweet and retweet from 3rd party contexts.

The big thing about ‘liking’ that you might not realize (though it is carried over from the days of being a fan of something on facebook) is that the entity that you like (such as drop.io, but that entity could be a specific product, restaurant, actor, etc.) gains the permission and ability to publish content directly into your facebook stream.  In other words, every entity in the facebook ecosystem (they call it the Open Graph) is a distribution hub, and when you like it, you subscribe to the published stream from that entity.  The rub?  In Twitter terms, the like button is a retweet button AND a follow button!  Facebook brilliantly renamed “become a fan” and merged that action into the more casual “like”, which will very likely spur people to subscribe to these distribution hubs without totally realizing what is going on.

“So what?”, I hear you cry.  ”Twitter’s @anywhere let’s you follow people too!” And it does/will. (To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if it’s released yet, and I’m a bit too lazy this morning to go check.  Someone will let me know in the comments).  But the one crucial new aspect of the Facebook system (also not fully appreciated) is that you can turn any page into an Open[ish] Graph object by throwing on a few meta tags into the header and having a like button on the page.  So Yelp’s hundreds of thousands of restaurants can each have a like button their page, and we now know that each one of those restaurant pages will then become a functioning distribution hub, able to send notices to followers/likers/subscribees!  And that’s the big takeaway from the new system.  Before, there was no programmatic way to elegantly set up a distribution hub on Facebook, but now it’s a few lines (<10) of code in a template.

And now back to the headline.  This is huge news: a game changer in the distribution space, and Twitter will respond with the analogous move in their system and allow the creation of accounts via the API.  Fred Wilson has been hinting at this as the final step in implementing a fully writable API, but with this latest move by Facebook the clock is ticking for Twitter to respond.

Maybe twitter isn’t that popular…

Twitter has not yet become as popular as the continuing extensive media coverage surrounding it would make you believe.  My evidence?  Take a look at this snapshot of a Google trends query for “facebook, twitter”:

The graph on the bottom represents how I used to feel twitter was doing with their mass-market adoption.  It portrays what we’ve all witnessed over the last year: all out love-fest on the part of the news media, who have embraced twitter and promoted it vigorously to viewers and readers (and with good reason: it’s a distribution service - content creators *should* love it).  The effect, however, has been a bit misleading.

When you look at the numbers of Google users who are searching for ‘facebook’ or ‘twitter’ (the top graph), the juxtaposition brings the hyped nature of Twitter into stark relief.  It’s not that Twitter’s growth hasn’t been healthy.  They have grown their product amazingly well, but the exposure we see in the news does not reflect a true wide adoption on the part of users.  I’m a big fan of the Twitter team and their API approach; this isn’t a comment on the past or future success of the service.  But, in an world that moves as quick as ours, it’s important to question our assumptions before they get the better of us.  I previously assumed that Twitter had achieved mass market adoption; Now, I’m not so sure they have.

A quick story about Art and the internet

Natasha Wescoat sent me an exciting email this past week to tell me she had finished a work I commissioned about a month ago.  I heard about Natasha through Hilary McHone, who retweeted Natasha announcing she had some time for commissions, if anyone was interested.  My wife and I have been meaning to adorn the walls of the apartment we’ve now been living in for three six seven months, so after a quick google image search to see what I was getting myself into, I replied that I would love to commission some art!  Why not?

Not sure of how to proceed, I sent Natasha a drop full of some photos I plucked from iPhoto for inspiration, and a number of her works that I especially liked.  (Someday she’ll tell me if this was an interesting way to work…to be honest I had some reservations about influencing the artist too much)

Natasha disappeared for a few weeks and then this past weekend, this photo appeared in my inbox:

Cool, huh?  I dig it when technology facilitates art and artists, and brings artists to an audience.  Straight from a retweet to my wall.  If I can just figure out which one to hang it on…

Twitter, Foursquare, and the Interface API Strategy

This post is prompted by Gowalla’s recent announcement of a read-only API.

Twitter users often describe the service as “Facebook status updates by itself, without the other stuff”.  This description is my favorite way to talk about the strategy behind Twitter’s design and their API, and what this strategy means for other startups charting a similar course.

Here’s my short version of the Interface API Strategy to World Domination:

Phase 1: Build a service around a single UI interaction (“What are you doing?”) and some basic but useful infrastructure (followers)

Phase 2: Leverage the simple API to spur the development of clients across all platforms and new value for users

Phase 3: Become the Internet Standard for your interaction and the resulting data

Phase 4: Profit.

It’s way more fun than collecting underpants.  By optimizing for a simple API focused on on user interaction, you get a hoard of hackers, hobbyists, and entrepreneurs who want to play in this arena fighting by your side, as well as the possibility that the progressive executive in that old media company will understand, without a 30 minute presentation, the kick-ass opportunities your service offers.  Twitter is already well on their way to becoming a standard interface on the web; I think they have small form distribution in the bag.

But now, we shall look into the (near) Future!  The next interface API victory story will be a location check-in service.  A once exciting web service cage match between newcomers Foursquare and Gowalla is proving to be something of a rout, with the scrappy and lean Foursquare announcing a new Old Media partnership every couple days or so, while Gowalla, laden down with a lot of new cash, fails to respond with a proper API.

Foursquare’s API, a huge driver of the service’s success, has all the characteristics of a winning design: their database structure is easy to understand, especially if you’ve used the service even once, and they allow full read/write access to almost every object.  Gowalla’s object structure is similarly straightforward, so they have the cash and the position to compete, but until they open up write access, we only have one location check-in interface API in the ring.

Check-ins: check.  What’s the next simple interface API?

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