According to the people at Twimbler, the answer is yes, but we're not so sure we see the point. Twimbler is a new Twitter mashup that uses a special hashtag to parse Twitter posts into a tumblelog format. The result is a tumblelog that you post to via Twitter, and to be frank, it's kind of silly.
The benefit of Twimbler, we suppose, is that it is one less service you need to log into to maintain your online presence. If you want to have a tumblelog and already use Twitter, with Twimbler you can continue to use Twitter as usual and gain a tumblelog without any extra work.
But the problem is that Twimbler doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from a normal Twitter stream, nor enough to really be a very robust tumblelogging platform. Twimbler is built around links. You tweet links at it via a hashtag, and it parses those links into posts. It recognizes YouTube vidoes and embeds those, but doesn't recognize images (as far as we could tell), nor does it recognize videos from other services. That means that it's basically a Twitter stream with YouTube videos embedded.
Because it is based on links, Twimbler also misses some of the features that most tumblelogging platforms support, such as quotes, events, or regular posts.
The final nail in Twimbler's coffin, however, is that many tumblelogging platforms, including Tumblr, support the automatic posting of your Twitter stream (among other outside activity streams). So if you really wanted to run a tumblelog off your Twitter stream, Tumblr could do it for you and offer a complete tumblelogging platform to boot. It won't parse YouTube video links from tweets into embeds, but I don't think that's enough of a differentiator to make Twimbler worth it.
What Twimbler does do well, however, is illustrate how services can use hashtags to build utility on top of Twitter. While checking out Twimbler I couldn't help but think that a neat bookmarking tool could be build on top of Twitter that way -- maybe a service that used a #delicious hash tag to send bookmarks to your del.icio.us account, for example.
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Seems like a pretty simple service. I imagine it could've been put together in days or even hours with the right programmer.
The biggest challenge to building anything on Twitter is the rate limitations in their API. You can't download messages more than 70 times per hour, or about once a minute, and you only get the last 20 tweets with each request.
If you're going to get more than 20 tweets per minute, you can't do it with the API. Twitter has a bot on Jabber/XMPP you can talk to, and I have not tried using it, but I imagine a site like this could follow the #log tweets with the "track" command on the chat bot.
I was considering answering your post by putting up a Twitter-to-delicious service overnight, which would've been a quick job with the API. If it actually picked up users and people were bookmarking faster than 20 links per hour across the entire service, it'd start missing messages not in the API responses and essentially be broken. Putting up an XMPP client with callbacks into a PHP script to make the del.icio.us posts, that needs to reliably stay connected 24/7, is a little more than I have time to do tonight.
It's a shame Twitter has had to limit the API so drastically compared to other services. They could be a great messaging platform for applications like this, as RRW has written about in the past, but not with the apparent lack of capacity they have right now.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | March 2, 2008 9:15 PM
Hi I'm one of the guys behind twimbler. First, thanks for reviewing our app. Second, as you can see, the app is far from being complete. It was supposed to be a contained test within a small group of friends/testers but now I realize that it is not possible to do such a contained anything in twitter.
Answering your first question... why you ask? Well I say... why not? In order to use Twimbler, you need zero configuration. No accounts, no options, not even follow somebody. You can try it super-easy just sending a simple hashtag format and if you are into this kind of ultra easy tumbling, then you may come addicted.
Posted by: sosa | March 3, 2008 12:35 AM