Scripting News: Is Twitter the next Netscape? (Scripting News)
Dan Cornish
· 1 year ago
I think that a better way to think of Twitter is Spyglass, the browser that became Internet Explorer. We are still way early in the game.
Brightkite seems to be a better application than twitter. The new iPhone client makes it really great to use. I argue that we are still in the experimentation phase. There will be a better idea in the next couple of months. Take a look at CompuServe forums. They had lockin, yet where are they now? Lockin to proprietary social networks is never going to work, hence the business model really lies somewhere else.
.LAG
· 1 year ago
"Lockin to proprietary social networks is never going to work, hence the business model really lies somewhere else." I think that's a great insight...and applied to Twitter, would explain why they haven't yet discovered a model (apparently).
Sasha Kane
· 1 year ago
Briefly as a newbie to Twitter there seems to be an evident lack of true substance to the communication applications on Twitter. It reminds me of the nice but transient holiday greetings one receives during the Christmas season. A warm "Merry Christmas" is uttered in all sincerity.....Then the the communicator and the object of the merry greeting is a flash and the exchange quickly forgotten.
If one is diligent in Twitter, persistant in their focusesed Tweets to a specific individual, the encounter may be taken a step forward to offline communication.
There also seems to be an element of clannish or cliquish behavior, which concerns me. There does not seem to be an effort on established Twitter users to welcome and mentor new users. There is a superficial cheesiness to Twitter. I have felt like a shiny metal ball clanging around the Twitter pinball world. I have likened the Twitter experience to walking town a street in Tijuana, Mexico. A "hawker" on every corner, pretty soon my senses go "TILT and I lose the messages completely. One marketing blog page fades into another...Sameness and not much originality. "No touchy-just looky-One dollar-One Dollar!"
I am being harsh because in my minds eye I can see the true potential for Twitter to truly make a change in how humanity has the strong potential to make the world a better place to inhabit!
Sasha
What is lacking is a sens of real community....Human beings are wired for human relationships.
howardlindzon
· 1 year ago
jim clarke does have a nice sailboat though no?
cshotton
· 1 year ago
Nail on the head. Netscape, take 2. As far as *I* am concerned, Twitter is dead to me until I can have a XMPP feed. IMO, it is nothing but a quirky IM aggregator and as such, I want the data in my IM feed, not a web page or custom desktop app.
And at the end of the day, what is the value of an IM aggregator? I can do that now with a good XMPP client and some clever manipulation of my buddy list. All they've done is shown what is possible and now someone in a garage somewhere is baking the Twitter killer. And Twitter will never see it until it is too late.
optionshiftk
· 1 year ago
Ok, if twitter is Netscape take 2, then what company do you think will buy twitter, and bail them out when things are going wrong?
marshal sandler
· 1 year ago
Mr Winer, Not being a tech savvy person but with a lot of business experience in my 72 years , I find Twitter in Many respects like Facebook ! I am not knocking either but they are ships without rudders ! If you have ever sailed a boat, after sailing free for a while you usually have to chart a course for somewhere ! Korsibski in his writings on General Semantics !Korzybski's dictum ("The map is not the territory") is also cited as an underlying principle used in neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that people's beliefs about reality and their awareness of things (the "map") are not reality itself or everything they could be aware of ("the territory"). The originators of NLP have been explicit that they owe this insight to General Semantics. Like the Kid's say Get Real Dude ! (:> MS
Stephen Michael Kellat
· 1 year ago
Steve Gillmor identified FriendFeed as one competitor that might supplant Twitter. Who do you think is jockeying for that position?
dave
· 1 year ago
I don't think FriendFeed is trying to compete with Twitter, nor do I think they have much of a shot in their current configuration. If they would have focused on Twitter when it was having big reliability issues, that would have been a different story. And if FriendFeed were acquired by a larger company that was focused on competing with Twitter then that could make a huge difference.
stevegillmor
· 1 year ago
they are clearly competing for high value realtime customers and will be shortly for track. They don't yet need a larger company. If they acquire a viral audience, they will be formidable. I believe they are doing so.
mdoeff
· 1 year ago
I think you're underestimating the stickiness factor that Twitter has. Many people have spent over a year cultivating their community on Twitter and that is a very difficult thing to replicate on a new, competing service. Switching to a technically superior browser is much easier because the switching cost is zero from a community standpoint. So far the pattern has been people experimenting with new Twitter-clones (Pownce, Plurk, Identi.ca, etc.) but ultimately returning to Twitter because that is where there community still lives.
dave
· 1 year ago
Actually I'm not underestimating it, and Netscape thought they had that kind of lock-in too, that's why no competitor is going to undercut Twitter in one swoop. But don't think Twitter has all that commanding a lead. It's still a relatively small community compared to AIM, or Yahoo Mail or even GMail. It's possible that after a few months or a couple of years, a big competitor might have more of your friends (the real-world kind) than Twitter does. Lock-in is not a very good defense, historically -- and that's what you're talking about.
mdoeff
· 1 year ago
I definitely agree that Twitter is very small in comparison to AIM, Yahoo Mail, and AIM. On paper, Google should be able to do to Twitter what Microsoft did to Netscape. They have GTalk, Jaiku, and Dodgeball but to date they haven't made any kind of serious threat to Twitter. Yahoo has continually fumbled their social networking efforts - Yahoo 360, Yahoo Mash (now shut down), and whatever their latest effort is called. Maybe Microsoft will make a move with Mesh but many people out there will never use MS products, which means that there will always be room for a strong #2. Facebook has had status updates even before Twitter and Twitter has thrived despite that. So who's left?
AndrewBurton
· 1 year ago
I keep thinking that AppEngine is ultimately going to be the "Twitter Killer" just as soon as someone releases a turn-key way of installing a Twitter-like system, but I could be wrong.
dave
· 1 year ago
BTW, switching to a different browser is easy today, because Firefox, Opera, Safari etc have had the time to get compatible with MSIE -- it took years to do it. When Netscape was planning on withstanding MSIE's competition they had those "Works In Netscape" badges they thought were their protection. Once Microsoft was dominant they made it "Works in MSIE" -- see where that got them? Long-term you don't keep customers by locking them in, you just incentivize them to dump you.
And to this day there are sites that only work with MSIE or require Windows. So that's just plain wrong -- there were lock-in barriers in browsers, still are there. People switch anyway.
Todd Waller | Ann Arbor Homes
· 1 year ago
When twitter was in the throes of reliability issues, a lot of folks in the real estate community bounced over to plurk and pownce. What we found was that when twitter was back up and reliable, we all went right back to twitter. Familiarity and all that.....
Simon Salt
· 1 year ago
I think that some of that territory is already being claimed, there are a wealth of "add-ons" and applications utilizing Twitter data and that market is only going to grow. That in itself helps provide a defense for Twitter because a competitor would have to persuade all of those developers to move their data streams to any new platform / provider.
Yule Heibel
· 1 year ago
OMG, thanks for that link to the "Red Hot Riding Hood" video -- I remember this one, but hadn't seen it in decades. So American, so funny, so authentic and true. And, yeah, what if Twitter turns out to be the hapless wolf....
dave
· 1 year ago
Glad you liked the video. I like hiding little easter eggs in these posts. :-)
I worry that Twitter is Little Red Riding Hood from the old Grimm fairy tale.
Dave, I disagree with your assessment, switching browsers is much much easier than switching to an Twitter alternative service. Switching a browser is a standalone action, install new browser and start using it. Switching to a Twitter alternative requires you to move your whole community and their friends and so on to the new service, many competitors have attempted to take on twitter and despite Twitter poor uptime, no one service has really challenged Twitter.
Ed
· 1 year ago
I was always the realist in business. Whether entrepreneurial or as team member in big biz. Usually positive, but a rigorous realist all the same.
Somehow, I'm just not worried for Twitter. Yes I know and agree with the Brad Fallon's that speed of execution is the new black [in business].
But I don't think we can put this particular company in a beaker. Twitter is one of the instances where brand love has a great chance to carry them over the speed bumps. I don't mean just those of who depend on it without thinking about it since it was twittr (or earlier).
I mean the users who take it for granted now, but could be easily awakened to replenish brand strength, and ALL the millions of users who are yet to fall in love with it. The leverage is still potential energy and it only takes a minute to morph it into kinetic.
Apple has a rabid fan base. It's awesome when that happens; when everyone accepts that they love sliced bread. Millions of those appleheads are yet to realize how much they love Twitter.
As the numbers solidify, I think Evan gains position in managing the data stream. Distributors didn't tell Hershey what to do once their chocolate bar got noticed. They asked for a role.
Respectfully, Ed
Seocharlie
· 1 year ago
Obviously I’m not an expert…just a regular user. What I feel when thinking on Twitter services is that it’s just “another” player on the web 2.0… cool and original maybe… but no more than that.
So, I’ve no doubt that some of the “Big ones” is currently working on something very similar to Twitter itself –if not buy it the company first.
The micro-blogging is popular than “regular blogs” right now for the simple fact that people can be telling others more than just an interesting articles but many times a day.
Great article… like usual.
.LAG
· 1 year ago
twitter's concept is so simple that once it breaks into the real mainstream -- if that ever happens -- it will be huge. Once you start using it, you get it right away. i think the 'firehose' and track, all of that jazz is for the techno-elite (nice to haves, but not must-haves for 80% of users); the ability to update friends, family, and associates in quick bursts has tremendous appeal for anyone. while they work out the technological and business model issues, twitter should spend some time on building great brand. it's by cultivating that brand, and the loyalty it engenders, which will prevent them from becoming Netscape2.
philmc
· 1 year ago
This isn't really an apt comparison. Even if Netscape had done everything you mentioned, they still would have gotten eaten up by MS. Why? Because MS bundled the browser with the operating system. Faced with a choice of using the browser that came with their operating system, or using one that took an hour or more to download for folks using dial-up, people did what was easy.
People who are using twitter are going to do what's easy; that means continuing to use twitter. I've seen people I'm following declare that they are going to stop posting on twitter and will only use identi.ca. A couple of weeks later, they're back on twitter because it has the critical mass. I suspect that 95% of twitter users don't know or care about the firehose, and the volume of information pouring out of it is irrelevant to them.
Don Dodge
· 1 year ago
Twitter is more like Facebook. It has a social network aspect to it that makes it harder to switch to something else.
The browser analogy doesn't work for me. Maybe more like a Web 2.0 version of AOL Instant Messenger with a social network mashed in. Social networks are hard to switch. AOL IM is still used by millions of people just because of the friends list.
Twitter has a great future if they can get a revenue model going...or get acquired by someone who already has a complementary reveune model.
EB
· 1 year ago
I think jaiku is the biggest competition to twitter and now that google acquired then i think twitters days are numbered. but until then i'll still be using my twitter ;)
VCMike
· 1 year ago
Dave, who do you suspect could be "one of the big guys [that] competes with Twitter," playing the role that Microsoft did vis a vis Netscape?
Great analogy, by the way, and one that any of us looking for the next "platform" on the web should pay heed to.
cade
· 10 months ago
i want to buy twitter stock but i cant seem to find it or its symbol. can someone email me about this? cadejohnson121@yahoo.com
sameasiteverwas
· 1 year ago
I think Twitter has even bigger problems long term than you indicate.
Whenever I'm evaluating the value of a new product/service, I always ask myself the same question:
If this disappeared tomorrow, how upset would I be?
If Netscape had disappeared in 1995/1996, I would have been seriously upset. Browsing the Web was important to me, and there was no alternative browser that was anywhere near as good as Netscape.
Twitter? I enjoy Twitter, but if it disappeared tomorrow, I could live without it, even if no immediate alternative emerged.
It's a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. And moving from the former category to the latter is the challenge for them long term.
All Comments
Brightkite seems to be a better application than twitter. The new iPhone client makes it really great to use. I argue that we are still in the experimentation phase. There will be a better idea in the next couple of months. Take a look at CompuServe forums. They had lockin, yet where are they now? Lockin to proprietary social networks is never going to work, hence the business model really lies somewhere else.
If one is diligent in Twitter, persistant in their focusesed Tweets to a specific individual, the encounter may be taken a step forward to offline communication.
There also seems to be an element of clannish or cliquish behavior, which concerns me. There does not seem to be an effort on established Twitter users to welcome and mentor new users. There is a superficial cheesiness to Twitter. I have felt like a shiny metal ball clanging around the Twitter pinball world. I have likened the Twitter experience to walking town a street in Tijuana, Mexico. A "hawker" on every corner, pretty soon my senses go "TILT and I lose the messages completely. One marketing blog page fades into another...Sameness and not much originality. "No touchy-just looky-One dollar-One Dollar!"
I am being harsh because in my minds eye I can see the true potential for Twitter to truly make a change in how humanity has the strong potential to make the world a better place to inhabit!
Sasha
What is lacking is a sens of real community....Human beings are wired for human relationships.
And at the end of the day, what is the value of an IM aggregator? I can do that now with a good XMPP client and some clever manipulation of my buddy list. All they've done is shown what is possible and now someone in a garage somewhere is baking the Twitter killer. And Twitter will never see it until it is too late.
And to this day there are sites that only work with MSIE or require Windows. So that's just plain wrong -- there were lock-in barriers in browsers, still are there. People switch anyway.
I worry that Twitter is Little Red Riding Hood from the old Grimm fairy tale.
I'd much rather see them be Bugs Bunny.
Usually positive, but a rigorous realist all the same.
Somehow, I'm just not worried for Twitter. Yes I know and agree with the Brad Fallon's that
speed of execution is the new black [in business].
But I don't think we can put this particular company in a beaker.
Twitter is one of the instances where brand love has a great chance to
carry them over the speed bumps.
I don't mean just those of who depend on it without thinking about
it since it was twittr (or earlier).
I mean the users who take it for granted now,
but could be easily awakened to replenish brand strength, and
ALL the millions of users who are yet to fall in love with it.
The leverage is still potential energy and it only takes a minute to morph
it into kinetic.
Apple has a rabid fan base. It's awesome when that happens; when
everyone accepts that they love sliced bread.
Millions of those appleheads are yet to realize how much they love Twitter.
As the numbers solidify, I think Evan gains position in managing the
data stream.
Distributors didn't tell Hershey what to do once their chocolate bar got noticed.
They asked for a role.
Respectfully,
Ed
What I feel when thinking on Twitter services is that it’s just “another” player on the web 2.0… cool and original maybe… but no more than that.
So, I’ve no doubt that some of the “Big ones” is currently working on something very similar to Twitter itself –if not buy it the company first.
The micro-blogging is popular than “regular blogs” right now for the simple fact that people can be telling others more than just an interesting articles but many times a day.
Great article… like usual.
People who are using twitter are going to do what's easy; that means continuing to use twitter. I've seen people I'm following declare that they are going to stop posting on twitter and will only use identi.ca. A couple of weeks later, they're back on twitter because it has the critical mass. I suspect that 95% of twitter users don't know or care about the firehose, and the volume of information pouring out of it is irrelevant to them.
The browser analogy doesn't work for me. Maybe more like a Web 2.0 version of AOL Instant Messenger with a social network mashed in. Social networks are hard to switch. AOL IM is still used by millions of people just because of the friends list.
Twitter has a great future if they can get a revenue model going...or get acquired by someone who already has a complementary reveune model.
Great analogy, by the way, and one that any of us looking for the next "platform" on the web should pay heed to.
cadejohnson121@yahoo.com
Whenever I'm evaluating the value of a new product/service, I always ask myself the same question:
If this disappeared tomorrow, how upset would I be?
If Netscape had disappeared in 1995/1996, I would have been seriously upset. Browsing the Web was important to me, and there was no alternative browser that was anywhere near as good as Netscape.
Twitter? I enjoy Twitter, but if it disappeared tomorrow, I could live without it, even if no immediate alternative emerged.
It's a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. And moving from the former category to the latter is the challenge for them long term.