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Why Twitter is a Big Deal (2009)
- malay 13y agoI was almost positive I had read the idea of Twitter as a protocol before (or something very similar), even though on Twitter[1] pg notes he never published this specific piece despite having written it in 2009. I really appreciated the simplicity of thinking of Twitter that way, and the definition has stuck with me. In case anyone else wanted to know where they read it, it's under Request for Startups, #3[2]. [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/338702876744482816 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/338702876744482816 [2] http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html
- pg 13y agoAha, that must be why I never published it. I turned it into an RFS instead.
- bobz 13y agoPaul, curious if your enthusiasm for twitter has waned in light of the direction they have taken since? Obviously it is still an influential platform, but the grand vision we all had doesn't seem to be materializing...
- pg 13y agoMy enthusiasm as a user hasn't waned. I use it increasingly often. But I'm not so enthusiastic about funding companies based on it. There are probably still opportunities for companies to grow by using Twitter initially, but it would be risky to start a company that depended on Twitter.
- davewiner 13y agoI still use it too, but I stopped developing new stuff using their APIs a couple of years ago. Next month they're probably going to break my last app that uses their API, and then it's going to create a tough choice for me. Do I post stuff there manually, or do I just stop pushing links through Twitter.
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- r00k 13y agoBecause they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. Makers of Twitter clients were eventually reminded of this fact in a rather painful way.
- monsterix 13y ago> Makers of Twitter clients were eventually reminded of this fact in a rather painful way. Isn't this a risk with all federated protocols - private or public immaterial?
- obviouslygreen 13y agoI would say not exactly: If you have a public protocol and it's intended to run in multiple places or in a distributed manner, then even if the rest of the world stops using it, you and your users can happily chug along in your own sandbox. If it's only used or useful in the context of a privately-owned/controlled environment... then you're in trouble, or likely to get there..
- davewiner 13y agoThat's absolutely correct. Google Reader ignored an important part of the RSS 2.0 spec, but I kept producing content that they couldn't parse, and if people used the tools that existed before GR, they didn't notice any difference, even though GR came to dominate RSS aggregators. BTW, that's probably a reason why Twitter never could really support RSS, not because the spec didn't cover what they were doing, rather Google didn't.
- austenallred 13y agoI would say yes, but unfortunately most of those that took that gamble have been shut out. If Twitter were really smart about the whole thing, given the amount of money they have, they should let others develop off of their platforms and acquire them as they start to gain traction.
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- mrwnmonm 13y agodoes this definition applied to tumblr too?
- mehrzad 13y agoSince Tumblr has supported multimedia content for a while, I'd say no. Twitter was (and is still mostly) text only. Protocols don't have to be text-only, but that's what makes Twitter feel like one, I guess? Just my two cents.
- lmm 13y agoTo my mind the fact that including pictures or video is less ad-hoc with Tumblr makes it more of a protocol, not less. Honestly Twitter doesn't feel particularly special to me - Facebook, Google+, even Livejournal feel like they're the same "kind of thing". Heck, at times Youtube behaves the same way. But I never got hugely into twitter, maybe it's different if you're a real fan.
- mehrzad 13y ago>To my mind the fact that including pictures or video is less ad-hoc with Tumblr makes it more of a protocol, I see what you mean, it's like Twitter but customizable to the core - true to any good protocol. What made twitter really a protocol was that so many clients were made for its liberal API.
- bsaul 13y agoBecause publishing a web page on any blog site lets you specify the recipients ? To be a "protocol" imply a sort of "standard" shared , improved and used by different "actors" ( that's the reason for a protocol : two different people aggreing on a way to communicate). Twitter has always been centralized and closed in that sense.
- why-el 13y agoAgreed. Twitter is in no sense a protocol. I think it became a great deal once people realized it is the only place for real time information flow, or at least that's how it's perceived among the Twitter users I know.
- davewiner 13y agoTweets do have recipients, which makes them different from a web page. At the next level up from the one you describe it is very much a protocol. Users get to decide whose tweets they follow and don't. And senders can block receivers if they want to. Twitter may have a very small something to say about that (spam, community standards) but for the most that's a free choice on the part of both the sender and the receiver.
- dmazin 13y agoIt is intellectually weak to post a predictive piece that you wrote in 2009 after it's come true.
- Shog9 13y agoJust think how much more enjoyable it would be if futurists kept their analyses and predictions to themselves until there was some actual evidence to support them though. I predict that as a group they'd be much more respected. Of course, we'd have to come up with a new name for them. "Histori...sts"
- eksith 13y agoOr "Ex-Post-Revelationists"?
- eksith 13y agoWhen is a repost justified if not when it comes true? It would still be justified if the prediction was spectacularly off, in which case we can all have a good laugh.
- dmazin 13y agoIt's not a repost, pg didn't publish this until now.
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- Tycho 13y agoYes, I thought this also. It's a protocol like email or IRC, except it's privately owned. And it's actually suited to being monopolised by a single company. I also wondered if you could characterise something like Facebook the same way. If you strip away all the extra functions, you have a protocol for setting up a private network of friends, identified by their real names, who can then broadcast to each other. Other social networks didn't have quite the same setup - not private by default, not real names.
- DigitalSea 13y agoBut Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer. They had an opportunity to be a free and open platform that spurns innovation instead they stifle it and impose ridiculous restrictions upon those who can only make the service better. In the beginning Twitter was a great platform to build on, but no doubt due to growing pressure to make money, Twitter have driven away a large number of developers, maybe Twitter will be fine without them but for how long?
- glomph 13y agospurs?
- Aqueous 13y agoI wouldn't really call it a protocol. If Twitter is a protocol, then every exposed JSON-emitting API is a protocol - and perhaps that's true. But Twitter isn't unique in that respect. People have been publishing messages without specified recipients for a long time - it's called broadcasting, or publishing, or web publishing. I wouldn't say the recipients are totally unspecified, either. What makes Twitter unique is the artificial limit imposed on messages that can be broadcasted indiscriminately. And that makes it more of a new form of communication than any kind of protocol. It leads to a new form of expression, and a new way of getting a fairly accurate global view of the attitudes and cultural tides that are flowing through humanity in real time. That does make it truly earth shaking.
- li-ch 13y agoJust out of curiosity, is there an open source twitter-like protocol?
- steveklabnik 13y agoThere is OStatus, supported by rstatus, diaspora, and status.net.