It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly worked in terms of adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it has even really made it out of the womb, by people that find it so important that they can't afford to really have it be a company.
And indeed it has happened. Evan Prodromou, creator of Wikitravel decided it was necessary, and so he built it. My name for it was Twitshadow. Evan's name: identi.ca. Identi.ca is a twitter clone website based on laconi.ca, his open source distributed twitter framework.
The basic concept is twitter style microblogging, but where instead of one company operating servers, anyone can set up interoperable laconi.ca servers. Think of the way email and email servers work in a highly distributed, fault tolerant way. Another good metaphor would be the less well known but perhaps closer analog XMPP. The server interoperability is based on a new protocol called OpenMicroBlogging.
From a business perspective, under normal circumstances, Twitter's huge user base would not be easily moveable. But Twitter's down time makes people hungry to switch. Dave Winer is gleeful. And as I suggested when discussing Twitshadow, Laconi.ca can be used as a front end for Twitter. Everything you post on a laconi.ca server can be mirrored to your twitter account. The one downside of this is that they don't yet support the twitter API making it harder for 3rd party Twitter apps like Twhirl and Twitterrific to support it. But I strongly suspect both the Twitter API will be supported quickly, and these third party apps will support laconi.ca based servers soon too.
As I see it, the handwriting is on the wall.
Of course in order for this to work, more people will need to set up their own servers. I believe this will happen, just like mail servers. It will take time, but it will happen. The open source community will get involved, the code will improve rapidly, and it will soon be far more featureful and robust than Twitter.
As I like to root for entrepreneurs, this is sad. But sad though it is, I fear I must call this one. The patient flatlined July 2nd at 7:35am.
RIP Twitter.
Please send all cards and condolences here.
7 comments:
Hank, you did indeed call this one way back in May (that's like two years ago in internet time). Nice job with that prediction.
-Morriss Partee
Oh btw, I saw the best tweet for how twitter could make 2.4 zilliion dollars. All they would have to do is have employers pay them to make the Fail Whale show up on all their employees' screens. (Maybe that's what's going on now?) ;)
Thanks Morriss!
nice post Hank
You hit it out the park my friend. Nice.
But there's still no SMS support, and the economics of running an SMS shortcode are going to make that nearly impossible to federate with open source/distributed providers. (Or maybe that's where Twitter carves out its niche).
Tim,
Indeed. Very good point. Both on the economics, and the fact that commercial services may be able to exist by, in part, providing sms gateways. Still, having that piece of the pie as compared to the whole pie starts to become less attractive as a business.
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