Twitter To Ecosystem: Seriously, Stop Making Apps

Twitter seems to be doing everything it can to make life miserable for the startups that make the apps you use to access Twitter from your computer and phone.

It's all because Twitter is switching from something called xAuth to oAuth. We'll stay out of the weeds.

Bascially, to get access to a user's direct messages (like any Twitter client needs to) that Twitter client now has to direct users to a Twitter.com Web page, where the user can approve the Twitter client.

It used to be all a user had to do was input their user name and password. This was a much simpler solution.

This will make life harder for third party Twitter apps and the people who want to use them.

Some people think that's the point.

Says one Twitter-ecoystem entreprenuer, "the headline is: Twitter to Ecosystem: Seriously, Stop Making Apps."

Over on Daring Fireball, Jon Gruber is also p/o'd: "I can’t think of any reason why Twitter would force native apps through OAuth other than to create a hurdle that steers users toward Twitter’s own official native clients."

Twitter has been at war with its third-party apps for a year or so now. It just bought one of them – TweetDeck – too keep it out of the hands of Bill Gross, who'd been rolling third-party apps up into a conglomerate.

We warned apps-makers this was coming a year ago, here: Here's Who Just Got Screwed By Twitter

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See Also:

• Smart Money (VCs) Has Stopped Buying Facebook And Twitter On Private Markets, Now It's Just Dumb Money (Rich People)
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• My Weirdly Not-Creepy First Tweetup Experience

Twitter To Ecosystem: Seriously, Stop Making Apps

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One Reason To Take New Search Engine Blekko Seriously (GOOG, MSFT)

Starting a new search engine is a rough business. Even the most promising attempts to challenge Google (and now Bing) always end up as punchlines: think Cuil or Wolfram Alpha.

Still, we think Blekko, which just launched publicly this morning, is worth paying attention to. Yes, it will probably fail -- all startups are long shots, and competing with Google and Microsoft from day one is an extreme long shot. But, Blekko doesn't need to beat either of them, but it just has to come in third place to be big enough to matter.

That said, Blekko has one big advantage over a lot of would-be Google competitors: Google couldn't copy its core selling point even if it wanted to.

The main differentiator of Blekko is the 'slashtag'. Slashtags are essentially filters for search results. Core slashtags are maintained by the community, a la Wikipedia, and consist of a list of domains that are considered authoritative on issues in those categories. So if a user types, say, '/health' after a search term, only results from sites considered sources of quality health content will be displayed.

The important new feature that is being announced with today's public launch is the 'autofiring' of slashtags. Starting with seven key search categories -- health, finance, lyrics, etc. -- Blekko algorithmically detects when a search query would normally return a lot of 'spammy' results from within a certain category, generally from SEO farms. It then automatically applies the relevant slashtag, so that users never see spammy content to begin with.

This does seem to improve the quality -- and in some cases safety -- of search results in the covered areas. And, unlike most innovations in search, this isn't something Google can simply replicate. Because the search leader is under constant regulatory scrutiny, it is constantly trying to prove that it takes no editorial stand whatsoever. Every tweak Google makes to its algorithm is met with howls of protest. If it started overtly excluding huge swathes of domains on subjective grounds, it would be swimming in lawsuits over night.

It seems clear that Blekko's slashtags can be useful for some categories of search. Whether they can be useful more broadly, and whether the company can build up a large, active community to help it make them useful, remains to be seen. But if there's really something here, Google may have trouble finding a way to replicate Blekko's upside without getting itself in trouble.

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See Also:

• New Search Tool Qwiki Won't Land You A Date With An Actress But It Will Help Plan Your Vacation
• Meet Google's New Search Boss: Udi Manber
• Google: No, We Don't Deliberately Sabotage Search Query Results

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/bGisnjuVuDQ/blekko-2010-11