Apparently, an app exists called PicFog…
…and it’s creator finds it implausible that I’ve never seen or heard of his site (until Saturday).
His application, like Twitcaps, presents a real-time updated grid of photos that are being linked on Twitter. Click on the picture and you receive a pop-up window that displays a larger version of the image, the text of the tweet and a button for retweeting it. Full-text search is also possible.
Go on, check it out @ http://picfog.com, but promise me you’ll come back to read the rest.
Pretty cool site, huh? I like the infinite scrolling feature. That’s a nice bit of ingenuity and a great solution to paging Twitter searches, a problem I’ve been dealing with on Twitcaps for the past week or so.
I first became aware of PicFog this weekend on the #iranelection Twitter feeds. There’s been no small amount of ink spilled about the failure of the mainstream media to properly (and promptly) cover the election-related clashes in Iran and how Twitter as a social media platform is being used to disseminate real-time information about the violence.
When I saw the links to PicFog, I initially confused them with the links I had been posting to #iranelection along the lines of “Real-time images http://twitcaps.com/search/iranelection”. I did a double take and realized theirs was an altogether different link.
I clicked through and saw a startlingly similar sight to the Twitcaps application I’ve been working on for the past two months. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my heart sank a little to see such a similar application, but I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Those close to me know the urgency I felt to get my app out there as fast as possible, for precisely this reason:
An application that parses tweets to display photos instead of links is forehead-slappingly obvious.
When I had the idea myself in late April, I searched Google and various Twitter app catalogs and found not so much as a peep along these lines. Stunning. An Opportunity. You can see the evolution of my thought after the first mini-application of this idea on www.the-grotto.com - May 6th - (http://bit.ly/18QTuOwww.the-grotto.com - May 6th - (http://bit.ly/18QTuO).
After launch, I noticed in the comments of this article at Download Squad (http://bit.ly/iCDdB) a comment from the creator of twitpicwall.com saying he wrote something very similar a while ago.
This prompted me to do another search, and I found http://tweetgrid.com/twitpicgrid in the Twitter API Developers’ Google Group. This was a bit closer to Twitcaps but having not quite as much functionality. Mind you, this is several weeks after Twitcaps’ launch. Still no mention of PicFog.
So, back to Picfog…
I took a look around the site, noticed that it didn’t have half the features of Twitcaps (metacaps, filters, and uhhh…CAPtures), and felt quite OK about the whole thing. Then my browser crashed on the infinite scroll (which may say more about my machine than PicFog, but still has not happened on Twitcaps) and I went back to pushing my application feeling honestly that I still very much preferred my own app.
So, today I do a search for “twitcaps” on Twitter and find this tweet from @PicFog:
“welcoming the first pixel-by-pixel PicFog ripoff :) http://twitcaps.com/”
I took this as a playful jab from one developer to another, how ever inaccurate the content. I’m human, and I don’t expect someone who’s invested a significant amount of time developing an application to welcome a similar app with open arms. I responded:
@picfog - Convergent evolution more like it. Don’t forget twitpicwall and twitpicgrid. Cheers though, it appears you do fine work yourself.
And then I see this from @picfog:
There’s something amazing in the level of shamelessness in their blog. No mentioning of picfog whatsoever. Anyway: bring-it-on.
Now this, I can’t let slide. I don’t know you, fella, and you don’t know me. Yes, there is an amazing level of “shamelessness” here by the very definition of the word because, having never heard of you or your fucking application, I FEEL NO SHAME.
The level of arrogance in his assumption that I’ve somehow ripped-him off strikes me as naive and maybe a tiny bit humorous. The Internet is a big place, and to presume that everyone is aware of PicFog can only be the ill-considered mouth poop of a bloated ego. From what I can gather browsing his development blog, PicFog has only been crashing browsers for a few months thus far.
Is it so far fetched to believe that I’ve never heard of PicFog? Why didn’t Wired (http://bit.ly/66W84) or DownloadSquad cover PicFog instead of Twitcaps, if the existence of his application is such common knowledge.
We’re implementing openly available APIs in quite obvious and straightforward ways here. We do not own the data, we do not own the content, and only an utter fool would claim inventorship of the only sensible interface for viewing real-time images. The convergence of the data-driven technologies our apps piggy-back upon is as inevitable as electricity, flight, and computation itself.
So, now, bring-it-on indeed. Let’s see if this guy, who is so proud of the originality of his ideas, can further develop PicFog without implementing a capture system. Without implementing a translation system. Without implementing on-demand Meta-Captures. Without implementing filters. Without implementing Friend captures. Without showing duplicate pics on the same screen.
If that is an impossible task, I will think no less of him for it. These apps don’t write themselves, surely, but often the functionality is entirely emergent. The ideas I built into Twitcaps are all variations on existing themes for user interfaces and functionality that seems to suggest itself both through use, and through the same APIs that are exposed to everyone building apps on these real-time platforms.
I’m just trying to build what I think is a cool idea. I don’t have any delusions that Twitcaps is a gateway to fame and fortune or that Google or Twitter itself, or Twitturly or any other more widely used Twitter app won’t soon implement exactly the same functionality as we both have arrived at, independently. I’m not even bothering with Google Adsense because it’s too much of a hassle to have to pay taxes on a $40-a-month check (probably much less).
Innovation is a great thing in my mind and competition is a primary driver. I welcome the competition, but I won’t sit back and let some random dood impugn my integrity as a developer.
And there, I have now mentioned PicFog on my blog.
2 years ago • 0 notes