Switching to SwitchABit

Thursday, May 15, 2008 by Dave Winer.

The SwitchABit platform was developed because we noticed that an ever more complex flow of ideas and information is being facilitated by editorial systems and aggregators such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Ustream, YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, Disqus, Wordpress, Tumblr, TypePad, Blogger, etc. And it's not likely to get any simpler over time, rather people are going to want to connect more apps together, with more flexibility and therefore more complexity.  

So we developed a platform to make it easy to set up these complex relationships. The focus has been on power with maximum ease of use. It's called SwitchABit, and it will go to private beta sometime in the next couple of weeks. We'll have a signup page where you can let us know you want to work with us on getting it smoothed out and ready for massive consumption. 

In the meantime, to prove that it's working, we've adapted two of my early Twitter-related apps, both on the Twittergram domain, to run on the SwitchABit platform. The first of these is ready for people to use -- the Flickr-to-Twitter functionality. If you're already a Twittergram user, you can go to the original setup page, and look for the yellow box with the picture of the friendly postman, and click on the link to be taken to the new site. Fill in the form, validate your account, and give it a whirl. 

It should be every bit as reliable as the original service (maybe more so) and quite a bit faster. It's also designed to scale to work for hundreds of thousands of users, Murphy-willing. 

Anyway -- wish us luck -- the journey begins today. We hope you come along for the ride!