Blog of a Student

The scrolling thing can be cumbersome I wont disagree with this but there are ways to get around this. For example a read more block… while this is a new supported feature the option to customize how ones posts appear has been a feature for as long as I have been using Tumblr. It’s true this requires going in and editing ones theme however the documentation for editing the theme is pretty good and as new features get supported the documentation is updated with surprising speed. I like the idea of having an option to set the default for reblogs so that the most recent comment is added at the top of the body section and then all the reblogged “conversation” if you will is displayed under a read more block so the reader has the option of putting the response in context if they feel so inclined.

In response to a lot of posts being reblogs, I think this is one of the things that makes Tumblr unique. Inherently it links(pun!) people with similar interests. I wonder what a reblog map would look like… each tumblelog has a dot and a line connecting it to each tumblelog reblogged with varying thickness depending on the number of rebloggs between the two. none the less, if 99% of all posts on were rebloggs I dont see how that discredits them? if a post is being reblogged its because someone would like to share that post with their “circle of friends/followers/stalkers” right?

Also, could you clarify what you you meant by “shows up as a reblog under the original post” ?

senthilnambi:

blogofastudent:

senthilnambi:

blogofastudent:

senthilnambi:

Hmm Supertweets. That sounds familiar. (Most of the posts are gone, but there is enough.)

rsscloud:

Unix had a shell language. DOS had a batch language. Lotus 1-2-3 had its macro language. Emacs is a programming tool as much as it is a text editor. We have gotten out of the habit of making programmable end-user products, but they are still just as important today as they were a couple of decades ago.

Every few weeks Scoble and I have an hour-plus conversation about what’s on each of our minds. The last few years it’s been all about Twitter of course, just like everyone else (or so it seems).

Lately our conversations have been ending up in the same dead-end.

Seems all good ideas begin and end with a phrase like: Of course they’ll never do it.

The “they” in the conversation is Twitter Corp, of course.

But we kept talking, and Scoble re-stated an idea that he’s been promoting publicly called SuperTweets, which was more or less exactly the idea for RSS enclosures, which led to podcasting. I didn’t need to pitch anyone to make that one happen, so those were happier times.

In our dead-end brainstorming I think we’ve been making an incorrect assumption, that all would be good if Twitter would just become an extensible metadata platform, allowing any developer to latch any data they wanted on any tweet, with Twitter storing at least a pointer to the data with the tweet, if not the actual data.

Now I think this was incorrect, because it assumed there would be client developers who are creative or brave enough to work with one another without waiting for Twitter to tell them where to go. I actually think the developer space around Twitter has been so scared of Twitter Corp for so long that even if they knew exactly how to turn the market upside-down they’d never risk pissing off the mother ship. So I think there’s virtually zero percent chance of any disruptive stuff coming from the developers. And without disruption, TwitterSpace will remain moribund and stuck.

Unless…

Of course you’ve read the title of this post so you know what I’m going to say. :-)

What if there were a relatively simple and low-power programming language built into a Twitter client that allowed power users to build their own little apps on top of Twitter. User interfaces for grouping tweets, or flowing groups of ideas to two places, Twitter and somewhere else. So that the bits that end up on Twitter are coherent and useful to people who don’t use the client, but somehow more useful to those who do.

And on the reading side, I want to add features that not everyone will want, but perhaps more people than just myself. And I don’t want to have write a whole client just to have those features.

For example, it’s been about two years since I first asked for an “unfollow-with-timeout.”

Use-case: Someone is live-tweeting a conference I don’t care about and hogging up all my bandwidth. I want to unfollow them for just a day. Now I don’t think the client guys are going to implement this anytime soon, but it’s the kind of feature a few hundred people would kill for.

I’d also like a “block-with-timeout” feature.

Shouldn’t have to block someone to remove a single tweet from view. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve blocked people just to get a turd they sent to me out of my @replies tab.

So I suspect the answer to Scoble’s void is we need a programmable Twitter client.

PS: I’m sure some or most of the comments will be from people who say they don’t need one. Okay maybe they can skip the comment because I know that most people don’t want this, at least until someone ships a script that they can’t live without. :-)

This is one of the reasons I love Tumblr so much. Theoretically one could use Tumblr in a manner very similar to Twitter by just doing “tumbls” of text but wait… with Tumblr one can add photos, videos, audio files, etc etc natively. Tumblr also supports an API that allows users(programmers/developers) to filter data based on just about any part of a post be it type, content, or how the user tagged it.

When I first saw Tumblr, I thought one day it might replace Twitter, but don’t think that any more. Sometimes the amount of crap on here overwhelms you. Also there is no inherent reply mechanism, reblogs are just too much trouble.

In your eyes, what is it specifically that makes a reblog that much more troublesome? If you could change how reblogs were handled, how would they behave?

Straight of the bat, it took me 4 seconds to scroll down and see what you replied. Sure 4 seconds isn’t that much in one sitting, but I assume you are scrolled 4 times as well and when you reply, I’d have to scroll 4 seconds, maybe even more. Soon it adds to hours and days. Sure I could shrink the original post, but that doesn’t do justice to the original author.

I read an article the other day about why Tumblr has reblog and tumblarity option instead of comments. After all Tumblr is a “mini-blog” and blogs by definition have comments (sure there are exceptions, but only the ones who get so many that they are tired of them, i.e. Merlin Mann, Seth Godin etc). The reason being each time I reblog, its a whole another post, not just a comment. With all the reblogs going around, I wouldn’t be surprised if majority or a considerable potion of tumblr posts are just reblogs, i.e. comments. (I tried finding the original post, but after 20 mins of search, I’ve come to conclusion either Tumblr search sucks or my search skills.)

To answer your question, I don’t think there’s an easy solution. If we change it to a excerpt model, where the entire post isn’t re-blogged every time, inevitably someone is going to take the original post out of context and the original author will go up in arms. I like Twitter’s “in reply to” method better. If I liked the tweet, I’d click on what it was in reply to. Sometimes I’ve spent 10 or 15 clicks to get to original tweet. I wish Twitter had a threaded conversation option, but just as a side option. Say when you click “In reply to”, you see all the related tweets as threads in a different page.

Another thing is the original post is about “Programmable Twitter Client.” Somehow we got to talking about the Tumblr’s reblog option. Yet this shows up as a reblog under the original post.