Everybody’s Twitter Now (plus: Hummus!)
April 16th, 2009 by naamanIt seems like everybody is trying to be Twitter these days. After the Facebook re-design, popularly believed to be Twitter-driven, I have just noticed this from Gmail/Gtalk: a new call-for-action when you update your status in Gmail. Looks at Gmail’s caption under the text entry box (I marked it dotted-red):
Notice the highlighted box:
Let people know what you’re up to, or share links to photos, videos, and web pages.
I think that’s new. Has anyone notice this before? That’s Google saying: we want to be your Twitter. Don’t be surprised when Gmail starts to offer a feed of friends’ status messages, any day now. You heard it here first.
[On an unrelated note, hey Ayman, check out that hummus video and The Hummus Blog to learn about some real hummus.]
April 17th, 2009 at 9:05 am
1. Copying the twitter model is a bad idea.
2. Everybody’s doing it these days.
The reason facebook’s attempt to pwn twitter is failing is the incredible lack of relevance. There is basically zero correlation between the people I care about and the people who update their FB status a lot, and a clearly negative correlation between the frequency of updates and the substantive contribution of the updates.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Why does it work on Twitter, then? Or you don’t think it does?
May 16th, 2009 at 5:16 am
We’ve been thinking about doing away with the photo part of photo uploads, and just allowing people to upload titles and descriptions, sort of status updates with meta-data. The photos thing really raises the bar too high.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:46 am
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