-
Website
http://www.scripting.com/ -
Original page
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/06/28/stateOfTheTwitterJune2008.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
It's up to the original source to unite all these comment sources into one place.
This brings us back to blogs as the place where conversations take place.
Is it not feasible to unite all the comments on, say, this post, via RSS (and trackback)?
42 comments on the blog itself.
14 comments on FF's link to the blog post.
24 comments on FF's link to the tweet where you mentioned the blog post.
Who knows how many twitter-only replies that didn't make it FF.
Don't all these fragmented conversations drive you nuts, considering they're all related to the same single post?
I think it's easy for everyone to jump off Twitter's back because of their recent problems (and easy to jump on FF's back when one or two influencers say so), but in retrospect, we all LOVED the service and didn't complain about the 'conversation' or lack thereof.
Nonetheless, I'm not quitting on Twitter and jumping on the bandwagon. I think they'll pull through and improve their service and stability.
If the Twitter-haters were actually paying a service fee then perhaps their complaints would mean something. Everything else is just self-aggrandizing horse shit.
That's been part of my problem with the various social networks all together, once the former hotness has competition, everyone jumps ship (think myspace vs facebook). It makes it really hard to keep a community of users together, especially more casual users of these services.
The other problem with Friendfeed and Plaxo Pulse, for that matter, is the repetitive nature of things. I've I've subscribed to someone's blogs rss feed and to Twitter and to FaceBook, why would I want to see your twits in all three locations.
It also seems like this is something XMPP pubsub could handle admirably.
However, put an O(n^2) on a exponentially growing user base and you'll do well to beat exponential scaling!!
Amusingly twitter does seem to amplify, accelerate, and distort lots of different things including the ultimate significance of the service itself.
All I ask is that before flushing, we really get to the bottom of why a centralised architecture might not work. I am friends with people intimately familiar with the problem, and they all say the main stumbling block for them is the time and effort which goes into supporting the SMS component of Twitter. They put it at ~90% of their time and resources.
Their costs in this are are HUGE. They have people whose sole job is to try and argue down these carrier costs. They have engineers dedicated to working with the flaky, anachronistic APIs. Growing the web and IM portion of Twitter is simple, even in a centralised architecture (IBM MQ would eat Twitter's load for breakfast), but scaling the time and money costs of interfacing with SMS carriers is demonstrably extremely difficult and can't be decentralised.
If this were the case, then perhaps Twitter would have SMS features "rest" and show, that in fact, they can get the rest of the app and architecture right.
Ok, I'm not going to map it all out but Google Reader + the application of some additional features + some blog enhancements would cover most of twitter's features.
I'm not discounting that you're onto something for some particular use cases of Twitter, but what you describe probably does not cover how Twitter is used for many people.
BTW, thanks for your enthusiasm on all these networks. Despite the gripes some people have about "spewage" lately, I personally enjoy following the day-to-day lives of some tech bigwigs. :-) If they don't like the SNR of a particular person, they're always welcome to unfollow.
Ironically, the spewers that are killing the system are also the ones that are bitching the loudest. How dare you take away our free emarketing/spam tool.
At some point Twitter is going to need to block the spewers. The big traffic guys will be up in arms (for a few minutes) and then move on to other networks. Twitter will be left with a system that can then run and provide service to the millions of other users that benefit from a short communication service.
Finally. Not sure why Twitter would say you couldn't decentralize this system. Makes them sound foolish. Maybe they meant you can't decentralize the way they've built Twitter...which is probably true.