DISQUS

Kyle Mathews · 1 year ago

What makes Twitter uniquely attractive is the multiple ways to send and receive "twits." You can send receive twits via your cellphone, IM, email, and through a web interface. This means you can be plugged-in to the twitter network 24/7 whether your at your computer or not.

gregory · 1 year ago

it all seems like such a dream from here in south india, a usb modem with a telcom that downloads at about 6 kilobits per, uploads at about 3, on a good day, i haven't a clue what my cellphone would be useful for on twitter, anyway, the sms thing is usually an interuption

its like you guys adopt, analyze, and move on, with technologies the rest of the world has no idea about

out in the cold

Ian Betteridge · 1 year ago

If the sum total of ideas that is Web 2.0 is "corporations are in charge of your data" then it's hardly "2.0" - it's "Client/Server Computing 1.0".

A truly Web 2.0 Twitter would be interoperable with a variety of other services, including locally-based versions. That interoperability would see "Twitter" (the service) as one of many services, all capable of talking to each other, based around a net topology rather than the kind of spoke-and-hub system it currently uses.

In other words, truly Web 2.0 - or is this Web 3.0? - services would never totally go down just because a single server dies, just as the net itself doesn't go down if a single router dies.

"And nobody has found a way to beat Google at monetizing the value of the open web."

And why does every service need monetizing? The only reason that you need lots of money to run a service is if you base it on having a single, central database owned by you - because then, you have to pay for that database, and it's bandwidth, and so on. There are many other ways to distribute information in a way that's decentralised and that reduces costs to a minimum - like P2P.

Brian Oberkirch · 1 year ago

Scott: Twitter contacts are marked up in hCard, which allows services like Dopplr to do a simple read of the public page and make matches on their system. While not a true consumer facing export, it is a step simpler than an API call and is in keeping with what makes Twitter useful (and valuable): it's open to extension, remixing & reuse with other pieces of the Web.

Brian Oberkirch · 1 year ago

Oh, and with a browser extension like Operator you could actually harvest the hCards from any Twitter page. Not just your own.

Arne · 1 year ago

Hi Scott, I see Twitter being used for professional reasons over here. The 'web experts' are connected together and tell + read about who is doing, what. And helping each other out by sending links or asking + answering questions.

Paul r · 1 year ago

Reading this reminded me of Scott Karp's piece as well...particulary about harnessing network effects. What makes users stay with Twitter? The people (read network effects).

free market research company · 1 year ago

There is a buzz in back corridors of IT industry that all these dot com companies do is disintermediation to re-intermediation...

Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago

If Twitter had better redundancy and contingency planning, such that it had a back-up plan or system in place during the Jobs keynote, would this conversation even be occurring?

Decentralization is one thing. Having a back-up plan to keep you going through a critical failure is another. They are separate issues that, IMHO, shouldn't be confused.

Twitter's lightweight interface, companion apps, and ability to tie multiple feeds together fairly seamlessly are strong selling points. However, it's the community and the appearance of greater and easier access to people who you couldn't normally talk to (in real time, that is) which are the real value.

On the surface, Orkut seems a lot like Facebook, without 99.5% of your friends, colleagues, or any other users, for that matter. (I'm generalizing, but I don't think I'm far off the mark) That's what differentiates Facebook from other like services. A massive community of communities built up around it. Twitter caught the attention of existing communities and hit/is hitting critical mass before the others, even though they have some superior functionality.

Joe · 1 year ago

I think Kyle nailed it with the first comment. Twitter's innovation was not micro blogging per se but rather the multiple options for connection allowing for continuous interaction on the run. Youtube was not the first video web service. The portability of the videos posted to Youtube was what made the site go.