I never got around to writing anything about the end of Favrd, and more than enough has certainly been written about it by now, but, since it’s gone, I wanted to take a moment to mention my friend Andrew Wooster’s similar service, Tweeteorites.
Unfortunately, I was too preoccupied with Birdfeed work to plug Tweeteorites when it was first released months ago, but it came out of an IM discussion Andrew and I had one day. We were talking about Twitter, and I mentioned a feature I have always wanted to see: a timeline of tweets favorited by people I follow. Not a Favrd-style leaderboard showing the top favorites, mind you, but a stream of everything the people I think are interesting or amusing enough to follow think is interesting or amusing. The idea came from the way Briana, my girlfriend, found almost everyone she follows on Twitter: by looking at the favorites of a few people she knew she liked, following some new people she found there, looking at their favorites, and so on. I had always wanted to create something that flattened that tree-like favorite trawling process out into a single stream.
Most people would have just nodded and said “Yeah, that’d be cool,” but Wooster, being the bad-ass, can-do kind of engineer he is, went off and actually built the damn thing! Here’s my stream, for example.
As I’ve used it, I’ve found I like Tweeteorites better than the Favrd leaderboard for the same reason I like Foursquare but not Yelp; or the reason I like the Last.fm page that shows what my friends are listening to, but not actual music recommendations; or the reason I like my Delicious network or Tumblr dashboard but not Digg. The latter services are usually only reliable ways to find the broadest possible stuff, because things have to appeal to the masses to bubble up to the top. The former services, however, show me what individual people whose opinion I respect think is cool simply by allowing me to observe them appreciating (if this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve written about this principle before).
A perfect example of the kind of “long tail” humor I tend to find through Tweeteorites that would fall through the cracks in competing services is the following tweet, by Twitter user @mary_block:
In order to find that funny, you would have to realize, as I did, that Caravan of Dreams is a sort of dorky, overly sincere, hippy-ish vegan restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. Seeing that tweet, favorited by my friend Frank, gave me that same special chuckle of recognition midwesterners must feel when MST3K sneaks in a reference to some obscure Wisconsin burger joint. I would never have found something like that in the broad, Leno-esque world of the Favrd leaderboard.
So, if you haven’t tried Tweeteorites yet, or have tried it and just thought it was a bad Favrd knockoff AND HOW DARE THEY, give it a try for a week or so. You might be surprised how much it grows on you.
Guy English’s thoughts on what he calls “Pop Software” mirror a lot of my own recent thoughts about the iPhone App Store, and why, in so many cases, the qualities that make people successful Mac developers are unhelpful (and possibly even harmful) in the iPhone market.
Unlike English, I’ve never really been involved in creating games or what you might call “novelty” applications. I learned my trade in the old school worlds of indie Mac software and Silicon Valley engineering, both of which are very focused on creating utility, maintaining quality, and ensuring correctness.
Since I’ve lived in New York, though, I’ve been exposed to a subtly different breed of software developer—one that thinks of software less in terms of utility and more as media. I think I first realized this when my friends at Magnetism Studios told me they were putting out a series of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as iPhone apps. It surprised me that that they had managed to make that happen, mainly, I think, because it would never have occurred to me to simply call the company and ask if they wanted to do a publishing deal! But it occurred to them, because they’re used to thinking of software as media.
Traditional “utility” software isn’t going away, but I think English is correct that the App Store has turned native application software into a mass medium, like the web. Perhaps this will change as mobile web technology becomes more viable for a broader range of applications and the overall market matures beyond its novelty phase, but for now, those who think of applications as content will continue to rule the App Store.