Twitter, the New Greasemonkey
Maybe I’m just weird but Twitter reminds me of Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey, as you doubtless remember, is a tool that makes it easy to install “user scripts” that modify the content of specific webpages as they are loaded. It can be used to hack up websites and bend them to your will (adding a “Delete” button to Gmail, for example, back in the days when it didn’t have one).
I was fascinated by Greasemonkey and wrote a bunch of handy scripts. But I was also concerned that the technology would never catch on because of its inherent weaknesses. As it transpires, I was right and no one talks much about Greasemonkey anymore. I disabled my last script (the Bloglines Sidebar Squeezer) when I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a few months ago.
I have similarly mixed feelings about Twitter. It has a couple of clear use cases, like starry-eyed fans following their idol’s every move or teenagers with nothing but time on their hands texting their friends en masse until their thumbs turn blue. Just like Greasemonkey is still a great tool for JavaScript developers who want to modify their view of website with a quick hack. But both tools do much more to demonstrate a clear and pressing need on the part of users than to solve it in a satisfying way.
In the case of Twitter, this need is to have more flexibility in how internet communication tools let us organize communities and how we are alerted when new messages arrive. But it doesn’t make sense to sign up for a whole new service to achieve this when we already have one or more IM programs. Instead, IM clients should let us create persistent group chats and receive particular types of messages by SMS (the latter is already an option in some apps, I believe). There are certain types of messages I’d like to send to a specific group of people, and occasionally I’d like to have certain messages sent straight to my cellphone. But it’s hard for me to see Twitter-as-a-standalone-solution as more than just a flash in the pan.
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so, what’s your suggestion? contact list management on browser?
Comment by nec — 5/24/2007 @ 11:23 pm
Well I certainly think that adding certain aspects of Twitter to existing communication tools makes more sense than a standalone service.
Comment by Matt — 5/25/2007 @ 9:09 am