Twitter: How to Steal an Idea and Make it Better

Posted on March 26th, 2008 in General

If you're tired of refreshing this page every day like a d-bag, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed.

Ok, a couple weeks ago, Nickycakes signed up and started using Twitter.  He was hesitant at first due to a few factors.

• Turnoff #1: shoemoney posted about it, which generally means it’s a crap service he’s been paid to promote
• Turnoff #2: nobody can really explain what twitter does, they just say to try it…no thanks
• Turnoff #3: it’s got a bunch of stupid web 2.0 graphics, which Nickycakes hates.  it’s got a bunch of bubbly clouds and screams “IM AN IPOD LOVING D-BAG”.
• Turnoff #4: it’s called TWITTER…seriously…twitter….sounds like some 13 year old girl dress up myspace game.  imagine the ridicule of using this service and then recommending it to family/friends.

So after much harassment to join by people, nickycakes signed up.  He’s not too sure why people have trouble describing exactly what this service does.  Here’s exactly what it is:

It’s facebook’s status updates.

There ya go.  They took facebooks status updates and made a whole website and api around it.  You post a short blurb about what you’re doing at the moment, and everyone who you’re friends with sees it on their feed.  They added a few small things like the ability to reply to people or send private messages, which can be forwarded to your cellphone or google chat, but that’s the basics.

But for a completely ripped off idea, it is pretty addictive.  There’s a firefox addon for it, which shows you popups in the lower right when new items show up on the feed, thunderbird style.  It’s super easy to use it from your cell if you’re bored on the subway or whatever.  ANDDDDD it’s syndicated on indexed blogs which lets you get a few backlinks for whatever links you’re posting.

And thank goodness, you can change the background of the page for your account so you dont have to look at those retarded clouds, otherwise the Cakes would have been out like a trout, for real.

So if you’re already signed up, or want to, go sign up and follow Nickycakes to see when he’s hittin up the gym or avoiding cooking for his girlfriend.  You never know when he’ll be dropping that tip on how to make billions of dollars a minute online with no work!!111~