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RFS 3: Things Built on Twitter
- boramalper 3y ago> RFS† 3: Things Built on Twitter > Twitter is important because it's a new protocol. Fundamentally it's a messaging protocol where you don't specify the recipients. It's really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely. Successful new protocols are rare. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. Each one of those protocols has spawned many successful companies. Twitter will too. > We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to encourage people to build stuff on top of it. So together we came up with a plan: anyone YC funds to do a startup based on Twitter will get priority access to the Twitter stream, and to people at Twitter. † RFS: Requests for Startups. ---- Initial discussion from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904193 A later discussion from 2012: Ask PG: Is RFS3 "Things built on Twitter" still sensible to prioritise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332000 To which pg replied: > It certainly doesn't seem as promising a territory as it used to. Not so much because it's more dangerous as because Twitter hasn't turned out to be a "platform" in the same sense as say iOS has.
- cl42 3y agoI think there's something to be said about trying to build a Twitter-like, open source protocol.