I’m hesitant to build too much on top of Twitter. Not just because of their historic instability, but because they’re a single silo – and each day brings a yet another silo.
With Ququoo.com, I’m relying on Twitter for registration. With the Twittergram work I’m doing, it’s that and a little bit more. Unlike Facebook, I don’t need permission to build these apps (a good thing), but with Twitter’s slower dev cycles, unreliable-ness, and not charging for anything (charging for something please! dev keys, anything!) I hesitate committing to much.
Today, to a great degree, the people that follow me, are following me on Twitter. 10 minutes from now, that may or not be the case. This post will be repub’d on Twitter, just as it is at Jaiku and Hictu, and in your own aggregator.
Just a reminder to work on projects that can easily go where the followers are rather than silo-specific projects.
Yep. People always wonder why I’m looking for alternatives to free products/services that charge instead, but you stated why.
When it’s free, you have absolutely no leverage to work with it. You have to take it on the free terms and live with it. That includes the likelihood of them folding *because* they were free.
I’ll take reasonably priced over free any day. It keeps the attached strings at bay.
I’m OK with (and sometimes like) a free *version*, but if there’s no way to pay to get, like you said, a dev key or a “pro” account, etc., it makes me nervous.