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Viva La Difference. Twitter could have been a vital component in the "small pieces loosely joined" philosophy of Internet-based applications. Back in its early

Viva La Difference. Twitter could have been a vital component in the "small pieces loosely joined" philosophy of Internet-based applications. Back in its early days I had friends who had servers hooked up to accounts that responded to tweets. It was an amazing thing.

rhizome 11y ago
"Small pieces loosely joined" is anathema to VC.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Not to really smart VCs. The ones with the long view rather than in-and-out-in-3-years-or-less.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Even then, you need a business model. Gitlab has a clear business model that works just fine even with the decentralized nature of Git. Nothing Twitter has tried to make money works at all if decentralized, or even if other people build clients for the same central server.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      That's absolutely true. But note how gitlab has made a product around git, even though git itself is free. There are quite a few products that twitter could have made around twitter itself that they never even looked at. At the same time, their costs are exorbitantly high (see 'whatsapp' for a company that gets this right). I don't think the situation for Twitter is as hopeless as it seems, but then again, I don't run Twitter so maybe that's just my naive optimism.
riffic 11y ago
Yep, core "twitter" protocol should have been written up as an RFC and set up de-centralized, like SMTP. Orgs shouldn't have twitter accounts, they should have their own twitter/microblog services!
- pferde 11y ago
  Isn't that what Laconica^WStatusnet^WGnusocial is all about? And, to some extent, pump.io.
  - riffic 11y ago
    yup and as far as I know, there's a stagnant committee at the w3c dedicated to drafting a spec: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
- pjc50 11y ago
  Spam and abuse fighting (not that Twitter is good at the latter, but they do occasionally try) are extremely hard to do in distributed systems. You end up building recentralised blocklists which have to get funded somehow.
  - riffic 11y ago
    That bikeshed will get painted at some point.
  - webmaven 11y ago
    We know so much about these problems from email spam, that I doubt that a decentralized microblogging system will ever be as overwhelmed (email still has to be backward compatible with cryptographically ignorant client software). Besides, even with email, centralized email services that trust other centralized implementations (as well as properly administered servers that have the correct credentials, rather than blocklists) have done much to shield ordinary users from the problem, and spam is now less than 50% of all email, compared to 90% in 2009. Abuse is a separate and tougher nut to crack, though.
- webmaven 11y ago
  I agree! I've asked that Twitter implement OStatus: https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464
pmlnr 11y ago
http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

rhizome 11y ago

"Small pieces loosely joined" is anathema to VC.

jacquesm 11y ago
Not to really smart VCs. The ones with the long view rather than in-and-out-in-3-years-or-less.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Even then, you need a business model. Gitlab has a clear business model that works just fine even with the decentralized nature of Git. Nothing Twitter has tried to make money works at all if decentralized, or even if other people build clients for the same central server.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    That's absolutely true. But note how gitlab has made a product around git, even though git itself is free. There are quite a few products that twitter could have made around twitter itself that they never even looked at. At the same time, their costs are exorbitantly high (see 'whatsapp' for a company that gets this right). I don't think the situation for Twitter is as hopeless as it seems, but then again, I don't run Twitter so maybe that's just my naive optimism.

riffic 11y ago

Yep, core "twitter" protocol should have been written up as an RFC and set up de-centralized, like SMTP. Orgs shouldn't have twitter accounts, they should have their own twitter/microblog services!

pferde 11y ago
Isn't that what Laconica^WStatusnet^WGnusocial is all about? And, to some extent, pump.io.
- riffic 11y ago
  yup and as far as I know, there's a stagnant committee at the w3c dedicated to drafting a spec: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
pjc50 11y ago
Spam and abuse fighting (not that Twitter is good at the latter, but they do occasionally try) are extremely hard to do in distributed systems. You end up building recentralised blocklists which have to get funded somehow.
- riffic 11y ago
  That bikeshed will get painted at some point.
- webmaven 11y ago
  We know so much about these problems from email spam, that I doubt that a decentralized microblogging system will ever be as overwhelmed (email still has to be backward compatible with cryptographically ignorant client software). Besides, even with email, centralized email services that trust other centralized implementations (as well as properly administered servers that have the correct credentials, rather than blocklists) have done much to shield ordinary users from the problem, and spam is now less than 50% of all email, compared to 90% in 2009. Abuse is a separate and tougher nut to crack, though.
webmaven 11y ago
I agree! I've asked that Twitter implement OStatus: https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464

pmlnr 11y ago

http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been