6 ms·

Poor Man's Email?

66 points by brlewis 18y ago

physcab 18y ago
I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter. I believe it's almost like a hazing ritual or proving ground. Twitter has enormous potential to integrate Google's Adsense (or more recently, FriendSense) or become another distributive voice for their products. The question though is, does Twitter want to be bought? Is Google too big now to let Twitter remain truly innovative (I know the catch to this argument is that Twitter has not been very innovative at all actually)? I have a feeling some big things will be rolling out the door. The founders have been smart enough to let the user base define the product, and I certainly believe that when the time is right, Twitter will be a killer. Hopefully they don't wait too long though.
- seldo 18y ago
  See, I agreed with you that Google would try to clone or buy out Twitter. That's what I thought they were trying to do when they bought Jaiku -- but then they sat on it for two years and then killed it completely, throwing the source overboard to save it at the last minute, like Netscape did. So that leaves a buyout -- in which case, what are they waiting for? Google is not known for hanging around debating acquisitions. It gets in early (with the notable exceptions of YouTube and DoubleClick). So is it waiting for Twitter to prove itself? With CNN constantly plugging Twitter and even members of congress getting in on the act, how much more does it have to prove? I think the time for Google to get involved has passed. They will partner with Twitter as an independent company, if anything.
  - peregrine 18y ago
    IMO I think Google is hoping that twitter becomes a better search platform to compete against it. Google is the top dog and nobody is even close to its dominance in the arena, it needs competition if it wants to avoid the whole anti-trust thing.
- omouse 18y ago
  >I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter. They already did this: Jaiku http://www.jaiku.com/ http://www.jaiku.com/ What's the point of trying to buy out Twitter when you've already bought out a Twitter-clone.
  - TweedHeads 18y ago
    Jaiku is a great twitter clone and can be improved much more to dethrone it. But the first thing they need to do is change that stupid name.
gry 18y ago
His speculation on Google 160 character limit is curious. Twitter made it 140 to allow for usernames and the colon prefix. There is a real reason for it, not a sacred "140 characters is arbitrary and magical" feeling Twitter is holding on to. http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/ http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born... Since 160 characters is/was the common limit to SMS -- which I think carriers themselves define, it feels like the author is missing a pretty key element in Twitter's implementation. The reserved 20 characters _is for_ metadata. I don't know the SMS protocol at all, but I suspect if Twitter could have dropped metadata into a header or somesuch, they would have.
- seldo 18y ago
  Yes, the idea that there is any extra room in the SMS protocol for metadata that Twitter is somehow missing is completely retarded. (Source: I spent 2 years building SMS-based applications for a mobile content company. I can format my SMS in binary, and trust me, there's no space in there.)
  - omarchowdhury 18y ago
    May I ask what company/product you worked for? I am launching my own SMS content service very soon, just curious.
    - seldo 18y ago
      They are called Boltblue (Boltblue.com). In terms of product offering they're very unexciting: just your bog-standard ringtone/wallpaper company. But I had to implement payment systems and an SMS gateway in Java, going all the way down to SMS binary format because (at the time) they sold black-and-white "service logos" for Nokias, a crazy hack which fitted 160x30 pixel binary images into multi-part SMS messages. (There are also a couple other mobile products where it's useful to be able to format your own SMS) I learned a lot and the people who worked there were great, although it's not a company that's going places.
  - lacker 18y ago
davi 18y ago
But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday. ... I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email. 1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one. 2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private. So why would Schmidt equate them, if they are so different? This is the interesting question raised by the post. I'm not sure how to answer it; but my guess is that the answer is unlikely to be found by thinking about the details of the SMS protocol.
- gry 18y ago
  Winer's argument rides on adding metadata, ergo why the SMS discussion is important. For Google to play in his argument, they need to solve the SMS problem, or ignore it altogether. The way I see it, since both are communication tools, this is why are equal. They soon diverge. The public and ad-hoc nature is where it is substantially different. A gross simplification of primary use cases: IM: 1 to 1, private, active Email: 1 to 1, private, active Twitter: 1 to many, public, passive -> active The passive/aspect of the conversation becomes more organic in a public space -- changes into an active conversation when someone tweets back. Why would he equate them? Only because it's a textual communication medium, IMHO. GTalk is in a way, an extension of GMail. If you're not there, it pops in your inbox. I don't see Twitter merging with email until it becomes part of the active conversation, something which should be pointedly and purposefully in your inbox.
- aston 18y ago
  Here's my best stab at it, from the perspective of a guy who saw the internet in its infancy (not myself): Email was the first great asynchronous digital mass communication tool built on the store-and-forward idea. Twitter (or SMS'd tweets, really) is another, much more limited form of the same technology.
tdavis 18y ago
Funny, I've been calling it a poor man's IRC from the start. I'll still take good mailing lists over Twitter any day, though.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  At least a decent mail/news client will track and aggregate all of your unread messages for easy consumption to keep up with the topics. Explicit threading in mail/news is just icing on the cake to make conversations so much easier to stay on top of. Twitter is the smoke signals of internet communication by comparison.
  - tdavis 18y ago
    Twitter also happens to be 95% noise. At least if someone is rambling in a mailing list, I know they're rambling on-topic. The tweet that made me stop opening my Twitter client entirely? "Just saw dog poop in the street."
Tichy 18y ago
I am surprised that Windows 7 doesn't have an inbuilt Twitter competitor (or does it?). With ICQ, lots of companies managed to grab a share, with Twitter nobody even seems to be trying. Weird.

66 points by brlewis 18y ago

I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter. I believe it's almost like a hazing ritual or proving ground. Twitter has enormous potential to integrate Google's Adsense (or more recently, FriendSense) or become another distributive voice for their products. The question though is, does Twitter want to be bought? Is Google too big now to let Twitter remain truly innovative (I know the catch to this argument is that Twitter has not been very innovative at all actually)? I have a feeling some big things will be rolling out the door. The founders have been smart enough to let the user base define the product, and I certainly believe that when the time is right, Twitter will be a killer. Hopefully they don't wait too long though.

seldo 18y ago
See, I agreed with you that Google would try to clone or buy out Twitter. That's what I thought they were trying to do when they bought Jaiku -- but then they sat on it for two years and then killed it completely, throwing the source overboard to save it at the last minute, like Netscape did. So that leaves a buyout -- in which case, what are they waiting for? Google is not known for hanging around debating acquisitions. It gets in early (with the notable exceptions of YouTube and DoubleClick). So is it waiting for Twitter to prove itself? With CNN constantly plugging Twitter and even members of congress getting in on the act, how much more does it have to prove? I think the time for Google to get involved has passed. They will partner with Twitter as an independent company, if anything.
- peregrine 18y ago
  IMO I think Google is hoping that twitter becomes a better search platform to compete against it. Google is the top dog and nobody is even close to its dominance in the arena, it needs competition if it wants to avoid the whole anti-trust thing.
omouse 18y ago
>I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter. They already did this: Jaiku http://www.jaiku.com/ http://www.jaiku.com/ What's the point of trying to buy out Twitter when you've already bought out a Twitter-clone.
- TweedHeads 18y ago
  Jaiku is a great twitter clone and can be improved much more to dethrone it. But the first thing they need to do is change that stupid name.

gry 18y ago

His speculation on Google 160 character limit is curious. Twitter made it 140 to allow for usernames and the colon prefix. There is a real reason for it, not a sacred "140 characters is arbitrary and magical" feeling Twitter is holding on to. http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/ http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born... Since 160 characters is/was the common limit to SMS -- which I think carriers themselves define, it feels like the author is missing a pretty key element in Twitter's implementation. The reserved 20 characters _is for_ metadata. I don't know the SMS protocol at all, but I suspect if Twitter could have dropped metadata into a header or somesuch, they would have.

seldo 18y ago
Yes, the idea that there is any extra room in the SMS protocol for metadata that Twitter is somehow missing is completely retarded. (Source: I spent 2 years building SMS-based applications for a mobile content company. I can format my SMS in binary, and trust me, there's no space in there.)
- omarchowdhury 18y ago
  May I ask what company/product you worked for? I am launching my own SMS content service very soon, just curious.
  - seldo 18y ago
    They are called Boltblue (Boltblue.com). In terms of product offering they're very unexciting: just your bog-standard ringtone/wallpaper company. But I had to implement payment systems and an SMS gateway in Java, going all the way down to SMS binary format because (at the time) they sold black-and-white "service logos" for Nokias, a crazy hack which fitted 160x30 pixel binary images into multi-part SMS messages. (There are also a couple other mobile products where it's useful to be able to format your own SMS) I learned a lot and the people who worked there were great, although it's not a company that's going places.
- lacker 18y ago

davi 18y ago

But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday. ... I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email. 1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one. 2. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private. So why would Schmidt equate them, if they are so different? This is the interesting question raised by the post. I'm not sure how to answer it; but my guess is that the answer is unlikely to be found by thinking about the details of the SMS protocol.

gry 18y ago
Winer's argument rides on adding metadata, ergo why the SMS discussion is important. For Google to play in his argument, they need to solve the SMS problem, or ignore it altogether. The way I see it, since both are communication tools, this is why are equal. They soon diverge. The public and ad-hoc nature is where it is substantially different. A gross simplification of primary use cases: IM: 1 to 1, private, active Email: 1 to 1, private, active Twitter: 1 to many, public, passive -> active The passive/aspect of the conversation becomes more organic in a public space -- changes into an active conversation when someone tweets back. Why would he equate them? Only because it's a textual communication medium, IMHO. GTalk is in a way, an extension of GMail. If you're not there, it pops in your inbox. I don't see Twitter merging with email until it becomes part of the active conversation, something which should be pointedly and purposefully in your inbox.
aston 18y ago
Here's my best stab at it, from the perspective of a guy who saw the internet in its infancy (not myself): Email was the first great asynchronous digital mass communication tool built on the store-and-forward idea. Twitter (or SMS'd tweets, really) is another, much more limited form of the same technology.

tdavis 18y ago

Funny, I've been calling it a poor man's IRC from the start. I'll still take good mailing lists over Twitter any day, though.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
At least a decent mail/news client will track and aggregate all of your unread messages for easy consumption to keep up with the topics. Explicit threading in mail/news is just icing on the cake to make conversations so much easier to stay on top of. Twitter is the smoke signals of internet communication by comparison.
- tdavis 18y ago
  Twitter also happens to be 95% noise. At least if someone is rambling in a mailing list, I know they're rambling on-topic. The tweet that made me stop opening my Twitter client entirely? "Just saw dog poop in the street."

Tichy 18y ago

I am surprised that Windows 7 doesn't have an inbuilt Twitter competitor (or does it?). With ICQ, lots of companies managed to grab a share, with Twitter nobody even seems to be trying. Weird.