As a developer on the iOS and Android platforms, I can only imagine the heartbreak developers are suffering from the recent change in Twitter's change in their Terms of Service (TOS) that is essentially telling the very developers that helped the company build it's critical mass to go pound sand.
The writing is on the wall, corporate interests must prevail. This will undoubtedly result in censoring of tweets, deletion of accounts, lawsuits over who has the right to "own" a twitter name. Really? Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt and the DVD.
Twitter is news. That's how I view it and have used it, but as of today, it will only be one of my news sources. Just another way to contact me, and it will be on equal footing with Google Alerts, and any other news source I choose to follow through an RSS feed.
I've set up a personal River of News that I use to follow feeds from people and sources I care about. Turns out it isn't that many, and I have an excellent system to manage that. Following and unFollowing is as simple as pasting or deleting a single line.
I follow an rss feed of a search query for anything that shows up on twitter with the term @adamcurry.
There are a couple people I follow directly. For them I use a handy bookmarklet that surfaces the rss feed of that person.
To send messages into the twitter silo, I publish an rss feed that is picked up by twitterfeed.com, whi in turn publish it to twitter under my account. I also have an archive of my messages in html and a machine readable version
You can follow me on twitter, or just add the rss feed to any magnitude of rss follwing machines (formerly known as an aggregator or feedreader)
If you want a setup like this for yourself, you can get it for free (as in beer), but you have to do a bit little bit of work. The results will be worth it.
The development of radio2 and the river of news are very exciting to me, a reboot of a technology that is far more prevalent on the net than twitter, and open for anyone to use and play with. None of the aforementioned restrictions apply.
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