Twitter’s enormous usage spike during SXSW was definitely felt back in the Bay Area, where I noticed the spike in mentions of Twitter in my RSS feeds, created my own Twitter account, and heard friends and colleagues discussing similar experiences. Though their gratuitous use of AJAX makes the site a bit painful to use while it is having growing pains (lots of unanswered XMLHttpRequests), overall I dig the Twitter aesthetic of minimalism with attention to details. It almost seeks to disappear. One detail I particularly like is the way long URLs are automatically fed through TinyURL, to save space in these messages meant for SMS and other forms of low-bandwidth communication.

This got me to thinking that Twitter’s parents are really services like TinyURL, little useful things that you hardly consider websites–just someplace you quickly stop by on the way to something else. Things like YouSendIt, ZShare, WatchThatPage, and of course del.icio.us. (In fact, Twitter is really just del.icio.us with a different attitude, and no requirement that your minutiae have a URL attached.) The best of these sites strive to disappear. The worst try to trap you, keep you dallying about, perhaps looking at ads, for a bit while you wait for a Javascript timer to count down or some such inanity. This may increase profits in the short run at the expense of long-term growth, as the commodity nature of this class of “utility” software means that people will gravitate toward the least annoying service. Twitter succeeds because it is as unobtrusive as possible for software that is all about being as obtrusive as possible.

More and more of my important data is stored on the web: my bookmarks at del.icio.us, my citations at CiteULike, and my notes at Backpack and Writeboard. I love these services, but I am fully aware that they could disappear at any time, taking my precious data with them. Fortunately, they all make it easy for me to back up my data to the location of my choice (in this case the SIMS servers, which are themselves backed up regularly).

Backing up Backpack data:

#! /bin/sh

curl -s -H 'X-POST_DATA_FORMAT: xml' 
    -o "/home/ryanshaw/backup/backpack/$$.xml" 
    -d '<request><token>[My Backpack API token]</token></request>' 
    http://rybesh.backpackit.com/ws/account/export

Backing up CiteULike data:

#! /bin/sh

URL="http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user"
DIR="/home/ryanshaw/backup/citeulike"

cd "$DIR/ryanshaw"
mv -f *.xml backup/
curl -s "$URL/ryanshaw" | /home/ryanshaw/bin/bib2xml -s 2> /dev/null

Backing up del.icio.us data:

#! /bin/sh

curl -s --user rybesh:[my password] 
    -o "/home/ryanshaw/backup/delicious/$$.xml" 
    http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all

Backing up Writeboard data:

#! /bin/sh

url="http://123.writeboard.com"
dir="/home/ryanshaw/backup/writeboard"
cookies="$dir/cookies.txt"

# args: writeboard_id, password
export_writeboard () {
    [ -d "$dir/$1" ] || mkdir "$dir/$1"
    curl -s -L -c $cookies -o /dev/null -d "password=$2" "$url/$1/login"
    curl -s -b $cookies -o "$dir/$1/$$.html" "$url/$1/v/export?format=html"
    rm -f $cookies
}

export_writeboard [writeboard ID from URL] [writeboard password]

I spent some time tonight playing around with Greasemonkey, and it pretty much blew my mind. What is it? Well, basically it is a platform for running scripts that inject new functionality into web interfaces. If you’re a UI designer, this might frighten you. What it means is that any kid with a bright idea and a knack for DHTML can create a new interface for your site, and it will probably be better than yours. (There’s a lot of bright kids out there in the world.) Why should you get paid when the bright kids will do your job better for free?

The key to survival will be going meta: design for the bright kids. Create a flexible, modular set of APIs and a well-documented example UI or two that shows how they are used. Learn from Amazon and release your grip on the end-user experience.

But developments like Greasemonkey disrupt more than just job descriptions: they disrupt business models too. For example, I will never see a Google AdSense ad again, thanks to a handy Greasemonkey script.

Will browser customizations like this play TiVo to to Google and Yahoo’s advertiser-supported businesses? Will Google and Yahoo respond like the entertainment industry did? Or will they beat the bright kids at their own game? Some predictions: some future version of a Google or Yahoo toolbar will re-inject any of their advertising that has been removed; uninstalling the toolbar will result in the loss of valuable functionality without which users of their services will be considerably impoverished; meanwhile the APIs for these services will grow ever more closely guarded.