I’ve been developing some twitter apps for the last couple of months. Which is a lousy excuse for letting this blog gain spider webs.
I’ve managed to get access to the public timeline via jabber and was delighted to work with so many skilled developers and build some quite successful apps.

But for the last weeks Twitter started to fail consistently. Downtime became a major factor and to avoid downtime Twitter decided to cut down some services.

One of the services that are now on hold are IM updates. This is the core of third party twitter apps, and all of them are out in the dark. Sure they could resort to scraping the public timeline RSS feed, but that will only cover around 85% of the updates, which for some may be enough to keep their sites running.

Some people are starting to turn to jaiku. Which in turn is being “invaded” by Brazilians, much like to what happened in earlier orkut years.

Right now the social microblogging market is ripe for a new major player to appear and steal the show. I’m sure both Microsoft and Yahoo have been watching this market. Both have IM clients that could easily integrate to a web microblogging platform.
Yahoo also has flickr which already works well with mobile tech and mobile picture uploading.

One thing is for sure, I wont be “wasting” so much time coding twitter apps soon.