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How Twitter can save itself from Doom
- Sukotto 16y agoFor others (like me until a moment ago) who don't know the name "Matt Mullenweg" ... He founded WordPress.
- gaborcselle 16y agoI don't understand how open sourcing or providing a distribution of Twitter would "save" it. (Or that it needs "saving" in the first place). What problem does open sourcing Twitter solve? The strength of Twitter is in the network effects: There's a single place to go and everyone's on it - your friends and @aplusk. And there's only one namespace, not a bunch of fragmented ones. Twitter's already as open as it can be - their API is likely the most-used one in the world. Open sourcing wouldn't be valuable to them, and they're not incentivized to do it.
- jerf 16y agoThe argument, boiled down: Twitter is a walled garden. Open sourcing twitter would unwall the garden. Failing to unwall the garden will result in Twitter suffering the fate that every walled garden before it has suffered. Successfully unwalling it at least gives it a chance. If you are hip to the ebb and flow of these sorts of things, I think you can already feel the Twitter-momentum fading, and the same network effects that make Twitter so potent can turn against it very quickly. Continued success is not inevitable and failure remains very much an options. Walled gardens always look inevitable at their peak, but even mighty AOL fell. In fact, calling AOL mighty probably sounds weird to you. That's what happens to walled gardens.
- anigbrowl 16y agoI thought this was going to be about a minimalist version of ASCII quake.