3 ms·
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
by 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 agoTwitter 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 agoWell, 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.