Chapter 2. Twitter Applications
kmakice What is past is prologue. Draw some inspiration from the Twitter developers who came before you.
Good design is not about originality. It is about improving upon an existing idea and meeting the needs not already being met. For your own new application, your success will likely be tied to understanding the culture of tweeting and of developing. You can learn a lot by examining what has already been done.
Twitter developers make up a large and thriving community. Lists of popular and useful tools abound. Brian Solis (@briansolis), a PR guru at FutureWorks and cofounder of the Social Media Club, recently created a list of 60 of his favorite Twitter applications.[54] The Twitter Fan Wiki has tracked over 300 applications, about half of which are web-based projects. The totals are almost double those from the previous year.
These numbers, however, are only a drop in the applications bucket. Ed Finkler (@funkatron) has identified almost 1,000 unique applications in his Twitter Source Tracker, and as of November 2008 Twitter had manually registered over 1,900 applications. By the time you read this, I’m positive that those numbers will have gone up significantly.
The goal of this chapter is not to present you with a directory of the world’s best Twitter applications, nor should the inclusion of any given tool be considered an endorsement. The purpose ...
Get Twitter API: Up and Running now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
