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I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it

I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely. There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble.. There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jalfresi 11y ago
Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....
- sbarre 11y ago
  That's ignoring the network effect and centralized environment that Twitter provides, without which GP might not have those 20k followers.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  All "social media" services are fundamentally "RSS feeds for humans". It's the same concept, with an easier interfaces and discovery mechanisms, and within a walled garden.
- mnutt 11y ago
  Scale RSS up to Twitter's size, interleave a user's subscribed feeds together, centralize it, and you have Twitter's scaling challenges.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    "centralize it" So... don't?
- petercooper 11y ago
  Well, we did. I was a blogger for about 7 years before Twitter came along. Twitter pretty much killed it for me as the masses went there. So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.
- mapgrep 11y ago
  RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is. RSS is fine for plumbing and pros but has not evolved into anything resembling a user-friendly system.
  - ljk 11y ago
    > * RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is.* Twitter has way more features than RSS, but do people really use "favorites" that often? The tweets I "fav'd" I don't really go back and check later, or maybe I'm not the targeted demographic
mtw 11y ago
For "friends", there is Facebook. You don't do " friends" on twitter, except if the friends are hackers or marketing types. Twitter is more for information

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jalfresi 11y ago

Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....

sbarre 11y ago
That's ignoring the network effect and centralized environment that Twitter provides, without which GP might not have those 20k followers.
cookiecaper 11y ago
All "social media" services are fundamentally "RSS feeds for humans". It's the same concept, with an easier interfaces and discovery mechanisms, and within a walled garden.
mnutt 11y ago
Scale RSS up to Twitter's size, interleave a user's subscribed feeds together, centralize it, and you have Twitter's scaling challenges.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  "centralize it" So... don't?
petercooper 11y ago
Well, we did. I was a blogger for about 7 years before Twitter came along. Twitter pretty much killed it for me as the masses went there. So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.
mapgrep 11y ago
RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is. RSS is fine for plumbing and pros but has not evolved into anything resembling a user-friendly system.
- ljk 11y ago
  > * RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is.* Twitter has way more features than RSS, but do people really use "favorites" that often? The tweets I "fav'd" I don't really go back and check later, or maybe I'm not the targeted demographic

mtw 11y ago

For "friends", there is Facebook. You don't do " friends" on twitter, except if the friends are hackers or marketing types. Twitter is more for information