Joshua Schachter is best known as the creator of Delicious. But a few years after he sold it to Yahoo in 2005, he left the company and joined Google. Since then, he’s been known to speak his mind about Delicious’ overall direction (which he doesn’t seem to like), and it’s pretty clear that he still has the desire to create. And that’s exactly what he did tonight, quietly launching a new service he’s developed called a tiny thread.
The idea is simple, take tweets and thread them together to form conversations, adding context. This works by using the a tiny thread site to both start new conversation threads, and add your comments to old ones. After authenticating via OAuth, your comment is then sent back to Twitter, with a link back to the a tiny thread conversation page.
The site’s look is sparse (not entirely unlike early Delicious), but it’s very easy to follow conversations. You can see a good example thread here. Right now, the threads only go one level deep, so it actually very much resembles a FriendFeed comment section. FriendFeed, was of course just bought today by Facebook, and its future is uncertain.
Other sites have attempted to thread tweets together in the past, but the results vary because of things like retweets that either break threads or add too much noise. Right now, it appears you can only add to these a tiny thread conversations on the site itself, so it works pretty well. But when you send the tweet back to Twitter, it just reads, “I joined a thread: is this thing on?” followed by a link to a tiny thread. It might be more interesting if it said what you actually said in the thread, enticing people to click on the link to read the full context.
It would seem that Schachter, who has been tweeting out links to this for about the past hour or so, did this on his own time, rather than his Google 20% time. Again, it’s extremely simple, but kind of interesting — especially in a post-FriendFeed acquisition world.
that is the ugliest site i have ever seen.
I like the collours the white and blue do it for me.
Craiglist?
Isn’t this what Digg, blogs, disqus, twitter, hackernews, reddit, facebook new feed, etc. do and plus provide search and user identity links? I find it hard to follow the conversation here and rather keep it in context where the users are.
Ha ha .. true, and I don’t see any value add using this site. Am fine with the twitter way. It’s a lame thought process from a successful entrepreneur. People develop twitter applications, but none of them are actually useful. To my knowledge a very few of them make sense. My favorite is http://www.boilingpage.com that shows what’s hot among people based on the tweets in twitter.
Don’t beef about the design since there is none yet. It’s a technical experiment. Just imagine the usual web 2.0 shiny stuff and you get the picture.
The idea is great. Use an audience you’ve already gathered instead of building a new one (like you had to when moving from Twitter to FriendFeed).
In my eyes this little unimposing site coule be the perfect addition to Twitter once (if ever) FF is gone.
Imagine if you could start threads on certain topics and people could reply to your post. You could have different sections for different topic areas, maybe call them “sub-forums”
Eventually you could have avatars and signatures and private messaging and oh shi
Imagine that building it would get you on Techcrunch! Come on Joshua, this is poor!
That sounds pretty cool — sounds like my current project!
Just another vision
He created an forum ? That’s new.
yes, a twitter forum.
Why were other cool twitter forums like http://tweetknot.com not covered on techcrunch, where as this is covered is it just because of its creator ?
yes.
I thought I told you enough with the twitter posts.
Whatever he does, do something about i18n problem. Drives me nuts.
Ha! Its not ugly……
This is 1st stage of development. You dont worry about beauty when building web apps. You grow and change the idea and it morphs and comes alive. As it becomes something that can be turned int a real product you then ass all the templating and graphics and make it all pretty. So it is really not good to concern yourself with graphics and styles in phase 1 of development.
Only thing I can say is with 5 min of adding some css styles this site could look much cooler.
This one really bad thing is he just gave me and my 27+ developers some good ideas on how to take the Twitter API and do some cool threading concepts
So Josh!!
27 developers? Do you have a website or product?
He has millions… of dollars.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
Not sure how I feel about moving the conversation off twitter completely. I think I’d still like my comments to be posted to twitter in their entirety, not as a link to another site.
Right now it seems like a simplified message board that authenticates with Twitter and pushes a link to your feed when you participate in a thread.
The idea is good, let him develop it! Good job!
http://3ad.at does the exact same thing, and it have better looks lol
3ad.at looks way better. Also like the fact that you can reply to certain tweets, write longer ones etc. But the best thing of course would be that Twitter themselves created threading. I mean come on, how hard can it be!? Facebook and others are going to run all over twitter if they do not start innovating.
Good work. I suppose he should develop such kinda thing. I suppose delious was by mistake only.
The most useless site featured on Techcrunch
Stay tuned to see multi/infinite level ‘forum’ conversational tweets etc powered by ‘Phreadz’
I’ve been looking at and working on this for a while
(optional) indentation ftw!
delicious has been one of the greatest site ever. Let him work with his idea…
Glad to see he took a break from complaining about yahoo to make this
Yeah, Twitter & FriendFeed are both in desperate need of threaded conversation. Kind of amazed it’s not happened sooner >:¬S
It might just be some inherent limitation in their systems?
*cough*!
Awesome idea
I am using http://watchntweet.me, note it goes beyond threaded search into the realm of socialtv.
#DonLemonCNN is using it.
As usual techcrunch covers the products based on its creator rather then product itslef. This is pathetic techcrunch
Hmmm … I wonder if this is an app designed in advance of the Google Wave with the idea that once the Wave launches, this app will truly be an awesome resource …
identi.ca/laconica already does this. it does groups as well.
Ha I love that you chose the “All hail Discordia!” thread for the screenshot. Excellent.
I like it!
How is this any different from what Laconi.ca has had since, like web 2.0? _And_ it actually looks good:
http://identi.ca/conversation/7894650#notice-7895668
It’s actually not threaded Twitter conversations at all. The initial post is tweeted but after that the conversation is continued in the thread and the comments don’t show up on Twitter as tweets.
Looks like a 6th graders computer project.
This really doesn’t seem all that innovative, or even TC newsworthy. Sounds like random PR to me. There’s many many sites that do this, and a lot of them manage it without making you visit their site to post, or linking back to it.
This looks like a afternoon of fooling around with OAuth and the Twitter API.
This isn’t newsworthy, you’re just pulling Schachter’s chain.
check out http://www.sp3ak.com for something similar … but a nicer look.
How ironic that Joshua Launches a Twitter tool after saying he hates the Delicious integration into Twitter.
With all the really innovative stuff being developed in really important areas like healthcare, etc. why does TC spend time reviewing a weekend hack that has been done before by lots of people.
I do not usually respond to stories in the way that I am about to, even when they are written about a competing service. But, as a bootstrapping entrepreneur this story has lit my competitive fire.
Have you seen http://www.tweetworks.com/ ? If not, then shame on me for not being better at PR because I could sure use the type of coverage and resultant users that you are sending to A Tiny Thread.
Tweetworks offers threaded conversations, private and public groups, meta data and an API to build upon. Within Tweetworks threads you can reply to a specific individual’s tweet without having to retype his username. You can also see his profile and what groups and conversations he has participated in all without leaving site.
Tweetworks users have created 2,839 groups ( 2,161 pubic and 678 private) on topics ranging from AllThingsWordPress to Yoga. Heck, there’s even a Professor at BYU teaching his Comms101 class via Tweetworks.
I would love the opportunity to give you a tour of Tweetworks and demonstrate how significant of an addition it is to the conversational web space.
I’ve put together some tutorial videos which should give you a sense of how we’ve made tweeting better for people. http://blog.tweetworks.com/tweetworks-tutorials/
Feature this man! Tweet Works = WIN
I’ve tried Tweetworks and after reviewing several other “threaded” conversation services based on the Twitter API, my money’s with them.