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Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field.

7 points by alexfarran 17y ago

jrockway 17y ago
identi.ca.
- onreact-com 17y ago
  The same issues, just smaller.
- wmf 17y ago
  Actually, Laconica.
muckster 17y ago
Well then let them follow the trajectory that SMS has - since in many ways twitter is just SMS over HTTP. Let twitter be coerced into interoperability like the telcos have ( http://bit.ly/jft6w http://bit.ly/jft6w ). Surely the necessary technical bits could be plucked from XMPP.
- pistoriusp 17y ago
  I've always considered twitter to be nothing more than an indexed comment.
onreact-com 17y ago
We clearly need a open microblogging standard where Twitter updates would not be controlled solely by Twitter itself.
- vannevar 17y ago
  We have one. It's extremely scalable and stable. It's well-tested, having been in use for 40 years, with a user base that has grown to around a billion worldwide. It's called email. See my comment above...
swombat 17y ago
It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. For a given, plucked-from-thin-air definition of "hard", no, it's not hard. In the real world, yes, it's hard. I don't see why the fact that people rely on Twitter should mean that they need to be broken up or opened up or any such thing.
dlsspy 17y ago
twitter is an SMS mailing list provider. Anyone can do this, but they quickly find that it costs lots and lots of money. For whatever reason, twitter has been given lots and lots of money to provide this service. It's otherwise impossible to compete with "provide a very expensive service for free"
- vannevar 17y ago
  Twitter can also be seen as a special case of email where: - every account is also a mailing list - messages have no body, only a subject line - all the messages flow through a single company's servers It would be technically trivial for a major email provider (say, Google) to create a Twitter clone.
  - dlsspy 17y ago
    Well, google has jaiku as well as gmail, of course. And there's plurk, and identi.ca, and several others. identi.ca is promising as it's federated and all that, but when you go there, you see the same thing over and over again: "How do I use this with SMS?" I don't think users understand the enormous cost twitter is just eating for no apparent reason. And that's the main thing twitter has that is hard to reproduce: SMS in and out at scale. It's not that that's a hard technical problem, it's just incredibly expensive to do that.

7 points by alexfarran 17y ago

jrockway 17y ago

identi.ca.

onreact-com 17y ago
The same issues, just smaller.
wmf 17y ago
Actually, Laconica.

muckster 17y ago

Well then let them follow the trajectory that SMS has - since in many ways twitter is just SMS over HTTP. Let twitter be coerced into interoperability like the telcos have ( http://bit.ly/jft6w http://bit.ly/jft6w ). Surely the necessary technical bits could be plucked from XMPP.

pistoriusp 17y ago
I've always considered twitter to be nothing more than an indexed comment.

onreact-com 17y ago

We clearly need a open microblogging standard where Twitter updates would not be controlled solely by Twitter itself.

vannevar 17y ago
We have one. It's extremely scalable and stable. It's well-tested, having been in use for 40 years, with a user base that has grown to around a billion worldwide. It's called email. See my comment above...

swombat 17y ago

It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. For a given, plucked-from-thin-air definition of "hard", no, it's not hard. In the real world, yes, it's hard. I don't see why the fact that people rely on Twitter should mean that they need to be broken up or opened up or any such thing.

dlsspy 17y ago

twitter is an SMS mailing list provider. Anyone can do this, but they quickly find that it costs lots and lots of money. For whatever reason, twitter has been given lots and lots of money to provide this service. It's otherwise impossible to compete with "provide a very expensive service for free"

vannevar 17y ago
Twitter can also be seen as a special case of email where: - every account is also a mailing list - messages have no body, only a subject line - all the messages flow through a single company's servers It would be technically trivial for a major email provider (say, Google) to create a Twitter clone.
- dlsspy 17y ago
  Well, google has jaiku as well as gmail, of course. And there's plurk, and identi.ca, and several others. identi.ca is promising as it's federated and all that, but when you go there, you see the same thing over and over again: "How do I use this with SMS?" I don't think users understand the enormous cost twitter is just eating for no apparent reason. And that's the main thing twitter has that is hard to reproduce: SMS in and out at scale. It's not that that's a hard technical problem, it's just incredibly expensive to do that.