If you work with APIs, create your own API. Try to build your own data library that will eventually accommodate to any significant changes in a developer ecosystem.
Photo Balakov
Back in December of 2008 I was still pushing out the 2006 idea (web archive, in Romanian) of “travel offers inquiries”, where travelers didn’t have to spend so much time with looking for the right accommodations for their trip, but have somebody else looking for them instead, some entities like the travel agents or similar.
For that travel system a Facebook app has been developed down the road (2008), with primitive location-based status capabilities.
After a while, Twitter API rang a bell some day and I started to implement a module that enabled users to search keywords on Twitter, mainly travel related, and saved the terms for later use.
Few days later, @gapingvoid tweeted something that captured my attention:
So my next thought was that PR and companies’ “tweeples” need to be educated on how to better use their “ztatus” updates. How can they do that? By simply asking for help from the people that can give good advices. And by paying for the best answers.
And so Tweetvisor was born (aka “Tweet Advisor”). With multiple columns of tweet timelines, a search box in the middle of the screen, save search terms feature (with a never-published internal API) and multi-account capabilities, here goes out the first version of the application, ready to face the world – (it didn’t have the “advisor” feature implemented though, and it still doesn’t have it even today).
Then, almost entire year of 2009 was a race of keeping the app updated with the latest API changes and the new features users requested to be implemented, or new ideas and visions I tried to add to the system in order to make it an even better tool for the social media “ztatuses”. Customer service resulted in making new friends among the users, most of them I still haven’t met in person. I have also interacted with Twitter’s people relatively rarely asking for their support whenever API suddenly drained my server while attempting to retrieve 20 lines of “ztatuses” out of a clogged system #justanexample. And finally, I have learned a lot of cool things about people, developers and third party ecosystems.
2009 was an year in which conversations, events, interactions, new friends, developing a tool that people really used because they loved it or needed it, innovating features that people appreciated made a lot of sense in my life.
But with time, most of those innovative features ended up also being implemented in other new applications and even Twitter.com itself.
I’ve so expected that, but I went ahead, in the middle of a normal developer ecosystem.
Until a few months ago, at the end of 2009, when I started contemplating on changing Tweetvisor’s name and diversifying the services - there are dozens of new ideas that keep brainstorming in there. At that time whois.net reported that “ztatus.com” was still a free domain, ready to receive the “ztatuses” of people willing to share them.
But I passed over registering that domain.
Which was probably a bad move, because today, due to multiple reasons gathered over the time and also the interesting news last week with Twitter finally confirming what I have predicted just a while back, I would have really loved to have the chance to buzz a headline like this:
“Tweetvisor is chaging its name to Ztatus.com and diversifies the social status services.”
But since ztatus.com was taken in January 2010 (the frustrating reason of this article :^), I obviously can’t do that this way (and, damn, I really liked that domain name).
Moving forward, I am not really sure how the plan is drafted, but my actions as a 3rd-half-of-the-day developer will surely continue to diversify, just like they did prior to Tweetvisor and the way they were since a few good months now, since I’ve realized that any ecosystem has its pitfalls.
And I will continue to closely listen to my own visions.
Tags: API, developer, ecosystem, twitter, visions
