6 ms·

Twitter is a protocol masquerading as an app.

• derrida 14y ago
  Free it now!
  • sp332 14y ago
    Free it? It's just 140-character blog platform and an SMS interface right? What's closed about it?
• k3n 14y ago
  Conversely, this has always been my complaint against the general hoopla and bandwagonning around Twitter -- they didn't do anything technically innovative. When they first started generating buzz, I instantly thought, "Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? That's killer!" But, that was not the case. Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, but as I see it, Twitter is nothing more than your run-of-the-mill 4chan board. I still don't understand the draw, but then again, there's a lot of facets of modern society that I simply have no explanation for (reality tv?!?) and have been better off not worrying about it further.
  • mikecane 14y ago
    People like to chat with other people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator
  • kristofferR 14y ago
    99,9% of people doesn't care at all about how technically innovative something is, they only care about how useful it is. And Twitter is incredibly useful.
    • bithive123 14y ago
      "Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.
      • jdminhbg 14y ago
        Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. In that sense, we literally did not believe how useful Twitter was. Also, Twitter is almost nothing like IRC in any respect other than being an electronic communication medium.
        • wtetzner 14y ago
          > Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. I'm still skeptical and I have used it.
          • philmcc 14y ago
            I think that's okay. He said Many, not Everyone. Right?
      • glhaynes 14y ago
        People don't expect "incredible" to mean "not credible" anymore.
        • bithive123 14y ago
          That's literally the most awesome thing I've read today, for all intensive purposes!
          • gfosco 14y ago
            ..... for all intents and purposes.
    • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      Well, it's not incredibly useful right now, and it would be had it been a single node and not the entire damned thing.
  • droob 14y ago
    Once the user base is big enough, that's the main draw.
    • protomyth 14y ago
      Right, Twitter's main feature isn't the messaging, it's the namespace.
  • untog 14y ago
    Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? Something the vast majority of people couldn't care less about. Twitter has, in effect, created a new messaging protocol, in the broadest sense of it. It's accessible on your computer, your phone, even your TV if you try hard enough. It's integrated with hundreds of apps and sites. Technically speaking it isn't doing anything particularly amazing (although the sheer scale they deal with is), but that's not really the point.
    • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      > It's accessible on your computer, your phone, even your TV if you try hard enough. Note the irony of this comment existing in a post about the service not being accessible, anywhere. Which wouldn't be the case had it been a protocol.
      • untog 14y ago
        A massively decentralised protocol would not exactly be the model of reliability, either. I'm not even sure how that could possibly work in a service like Twitter.
        • mkr-hn 14y ago
          It would probably work like an IRC network. A network might involve hundreds of servers, but you only notice which server another person is using when there's a netsplit. Split users can reconnect using another server and rejoin the channel with only a slight interruption. An IRC-styled Twitter would need some sort of synchronization service to handle twitsplits.
        • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
          Has email ever been down, like, everywhere?
          • untog 14y ago
            If you think of it like e-mail, who runs the equivalent of the e-mail servers? Your ISP?
• jaxn 14y ago
  s/protocol/abstraction layer/ What is great about Twitter is that it allows both the sender and the receiver to choose if they want to interact over the web, through an app, via SMS or even email (receiving DMs). Take the lowest common denominator across all platforms (no subejct, max 160 chars in SMS) and sit in the middle as an abstraction.