A few changes to the FB API and Twitter could really have some problems on their hands.

Maybe it’s because I’m not pimping my name/latestcriticalopinion/website/company/idea/adsense and following 25,000 twitters that I don’t get it. How does anyone really have time to follow a gtalk track stream in realtime anyway? Oh..vc money I guess.

About the staggered API requests: Twitter caches the public_timeline api so the most you could get is 60 tweets / minute even if you checked it every second.

In discussions about Track with others I have thought about the fact that if you gave any mook access to the realtime stream that you would not only be giving away the keys to the kingdom but a smart person could use the XMPP stream for less than social reasons. Here is a river of information, already public, already prone, that not only could be re-purposed but used to siphon value away from Twitter’s information currency. For large users of the API or XMPP, they can spot that right away. What about an individual who sets up a focused Track trap through something as simple as the XMPP/Jabber IM client, creating a huge document full of data stored for free in his Gmail box that he can sift through for whatever reason?

I begin to wonder if when Track returns there will be controls not only for the services using the stream (business arrangements indeed!) but if there will be a limit on how many Track words an individual can use at one time without a premium or a throttle to prevent the Twitter servers from glowing Cherry Red…

As rare as it is, the genie escaped the bottle for a time giving some of us a taste of what this torrent of information energy could do and then they closed the flume, coaxing the genie back behind their wall. Something as innocuous as a messaging system that people use to share what they’re stuffing in their mouths or how much they hate traffic has the potential to be many things for many people. Twitter has not handled the invasive growth of their service, the subsequent collapses and hobbled current operation with much grace or even initial acknowledgment of the effect on their addicted core users.They, silent, push the annoying junkies from their doorway as they head to the health food store for a lactose free beverage or off to the beach, knowing full well the hooks are set, the demand is there and all they need now is to shore of the banks of the river and start selling water rights.

We as users are unfortunately getting used to being treated like criminals. We all love a deal and especially anything for free. We tend to hack and workaround things when they don’t do what we need them to do or when the provider holds them hostage. But we have a limit and tend to vote with our feet, even if it’s just to the other side of the street for a 2 year contract and then wander back, muttering about how things were over there.

They have an opportunity here to build a relationship with their users to be the evangelists they need to go to the next level when they’ve restructured their system. I was discussing what I felt was so important about Twitter with a non-user yesterday and went to try to show him and of course, Twitter was completely pear shaped. Not a good chance for growth there…

Man, they need to get their features squared away and this thing solid because if they don’t, someone else will. The current alternatives are not much to look at but someone else is coming. Enterprise will not stand for the flaky, just-out-of-rehab operation we’ve seen in the last 6 weeks. If they change their access to the stream for big and power users, so be it. It has to work. It wouldn’t be the first time a great idea was done better by someone other than the inventor.