The public timeline can be useful in the early days of a microblogging service, as I have recently discovered with the introduction of SAPTalk at SAP. While there are only a few users of a service and the social graph is very sparse, the public timeline is the easiest way to find & follow new people.
Once the service is established, the public timeline is much less useful - but it's still quite a good way for complete newbies to get a feel for what's going on. Without the public timeline, new users have a chicken & egg problem to deal with - they access the service, see very few (if any) messages, and wonder what the big deal is with all this microblogging nonsense and don't come back for 6 months. Just my 2p, Darren On Sun, 2010-03-07 at 18:51 +0200, Vassil Dichev wrote: > > IMO we don't need it. > > We have search and streams. > > > > On 7. mars 2010, at 17.25, Richard Hirsch wrote: > > > >> Do we even need the public timeline? Or should it just be accessible > >> via Streams Page. > > I've said before that I don't see much utility in the public timeline, > and it also poses performance problems, as it's difficult to cache and > doesn't scale well.
