5 ms·
It's not surprising really, is being a centralized message bus really attractive when it just means that you'll be responsible for policing it? If you run a ce
by throwawayReply 10y ago
It's not surprising really, is being a centralized message bus really attractive when it just means that you'll be responsible for policing it?
If you run a central message bus off which people can produce their own applications, you'll find yourself having to deal with everything that ISPs and mail providers have to deal with. That means being asked to keep logs for years, dealing with DMCA takedowns, filtering the worst of the internet, etc.
And for what? As soon as anyone relying on it achieves scale they'll re-implement it themselves.
Besides, what you've described is the opposite of a protocol: an inner platform.
- macca321 10y agoI disagree that anyone else could re-implement it. Once you have a critical mass of listeners, it would become the first port of call for any message you wanted to distribute. As for policing, I think that would probably be where the money would be made - reputation/quality of the messages being posted.
- loceng 10y agoWhy would people pay additionally when they don't need to pay now (relative) to distribute/post messages?
- macca321 10y agoSuppose twitter had become a giant json firehose, and you could listen to it and, for example, build a jobs listings website from the jobadvert microformatted tweets. It would end up full of fake job spam, and the listeners might want quality filters. I can imagine that you might pay to validate your identity as not-a-spammer.
- loceng 10y agoHow would "Twitter" capture that value and not some third-party platform who and offers those filter services? The value and revenue isn't with Twitter then, so then how does Twitter pay bills? Or am I seeing this in a different light than you do?
- dasil003 10y agoAs far as I can tell a simple freemium model would have worked. You charge for the firehose and anything high volume, but you give a generous free allowance to keep the grassroots ecosystem healthy. They could have played all the same pricing games that Facebook is now playing, except across a much wider range of channels. I'm not saying it was a slam dunk, but a lot of talk about this back in 2007/2008 and there was a palpable excitement about Twitter apps. Within a few years the media-company mindset had taken grasp, the valuations and expectations exploded, and now we have boring old Twitter which is still a damn cool thing in its own right, but which is seen as a failure because of a combination of pedestrian vision and mismanaged expectations.
- macca321 10y agoI'm not saying it would have been a good business decision for Twitter, but it would have been pretty neat for developers and users.
- drusepth 10y agoWouldn't spammers (assuming they're spamming to make money, and therefore likely make more than $0 per spam) also just pay money to be validated in the same way?
- loceng 10y agoInteresting thought. Legitimate posters could hopefully could out price spammers.
- codingmyway 10y agoThey could add several seconds of latency by default and sell high speed premium to trading bots. Humans don't care about a few seconds.
- loceng 10y agoHumans definitely care about a few seconds, interesting strategy though.
- karakal 10y agoWhy would you want to build a service that distributes applications to mobile phones? There are many ways to make money.