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"Birdfeeder, a prototype implementation of a distributed and secure microblogging protocol called FETHR, which operates independently of (but connects to) Twitter. I posted my comment to a personal instance of Birdfeeder, which happily accepted it, digitally signed it, entangled it with other messages in my timeline, and forwarded it on to my FETHR subscribers—one of which is a Twitter gateway, which takes care of forwarding my messages on to my Twitterstream. It’s also responsible for sending me messages from people I follow, so (as you can see from the screenshot) I never have to leave my Birdfeeder interface—and therefore can occasionally miss minor Twitter glitches. (Or, as in this case, major hour-long outages. Nothing yet on the status blog, either, so it must really be all-hands-on-deck over at Twitter HQ. Update: Over an hour in, there’s a small note on the status blog.)
When Twitter eventually comes back up, the gateway will busy itself with the task of forwarding along my queued messages and fetching news from my Twitter subscriptions. I can continue to tweet in the meantime and even page back through my entire history and the archived messages of my friends. This is the fundamental benefit of decentralized micropublishing: independent providers may experience local failures without bringing the whole damn thing to a screeching halt.
So, in something of a twist on the usual, Twitter is down for everyone—but not me. "
- http://dsandler.org/wp/archives/2008/11/18/twit...
While, as I recall, there were some people at VisiCorp who didn't take Mitch seriously WRT making a new product, we at Software Arts did take him seriously and tried to warn VisiCorp. There were some very difficult business issues related to VisiCalc (and the relationship between Software Arts and VisiCorp) that hobbled advancement. We also had the problem of porting VisiCalc to many quite different computers, and, like Microsoft with Multiplan, went off on a higher-level language approach for version 2. This all slowed our addition of new features. (IBM wanted VisiCalc, which they got on time, and it had to run on a single floppy 64KB machine, which 1-2-3 didn't -- 1-2-3 needed dual-floppies and 256KB, as I recall. We sold more copies of IBM PC VisiCalc than any other version, I think.) VisiCorp was busy making their VisiOn mouse-based system (which goaded Microsoft into doing Windows) and VisiOnCalc. They over-reached in many ways.
Lotus did an incredible rifle shot right at just the IBM PC with great assembler code. (At the time we first put VisiCalc on it, the IBM PC had not yet "won" and there was no Mac. 1-2-3 probably helped them win. So did Compaq by making a software-compatible machine, not software-almost-compatible.) Lotus also improved on our product in many ways, copying where appropriate and innovating where needed. They had great marketing and sales. Mitch, having been VisiCalc product manager at VisiCorp, knew the market well and put together a stellar team when he moved back to Massachusetts and founded Lotus. And, of course, 1-2-3 could read VisiCalc data and use it directly, so upgrading was easy. They beat out the maybe 50 other "VisiClones" and "Calc-alikes" for good reasons. Later, Lotus over-did things with Jazz on the Mac and got hit by Microsoft doing just the right amount of innovation with Excel.
Twitter, as far as I know, doesn't have the business relationship baggage that we and VisiCorp had, nor the burden of not knowing which personal computer design would become dominant, so the analogy about just ignoring Mitch isn't really that close. The question is are they moving ahead with what is needed. Not too much and not too little. (Should this be the "Goldilocks Design Question"?)
I think that you are right that a leader that gets complacent or thinks they can do no wrong can be replaced by someone who gives people what they want and need, and delivers it with a superb team of developers and marketers. I believe that your basic thesis, that there could be a 1-2-3 to Twitter's VisiCalc, taking the basic goodness and improving upon it and being there for the big growth period, is sound. The question is, will that product be made by Twitter (if it is paranoid enough to survive) or not.
-DanB
I hope you continue this dialog as I know you are on to something, I just am not sure of the structure yet. I look forward to hearing/seeing more. -Chris
grok the way Twitter works. Anything else has a steep learning curve, and
only a probability of gaining traction. By cloning you factor out the
uncertainty, which is high. Most new UIs don't gain traction, as has been
FF's experience.
So does Twitter's legacy end up being "the one who defined 140 characters as micro-blogging", or is that restriction a configurable option as well?
I don't think any of this lets out Twitter, Inc. If they wanted to do a 180-degree turn they could start serving power users. But I don't expect it to happen, not as their growth keeps skyrocketing.
As I wrote the list I imagined that if Fred or Bijan weren't already investors in Twitter, they'd be trying hard to get something like this started. That's the funny thing about it, they can't really take part in the discussion, they have to be faithful to the board they serve on. But as users, I imagine they lust for almost everything on my list. (And they have probably have a few of their own.) I put the thing on Disqus on the list not just because I want it, but also because it would torment Fred, in a friendly way -- he's an investor in Disqus. :-)
I still enjoy Twitter more than ever, but with the intense media coverage and influx of celebrities that just don't "get it," the backlash is brewing, and it will be a maelstrom.
People always asks me, "What's next?," and I think you've encapsulated the next wave well.
Now, let's see the idea put into motion.
to be CEO -- so it's up to the would-be CEO to put together the team. I'd be
an advisor, board member, designer, promoter, community leader.
I should add that it has to start out as an *exact* Twitter clone.
I'm not big on SMS either at least in it's current pricing.
Visicalc had trig functions. Most people didn't need them. Pretty sure Lotus
implemented them anyway cause they wanted to run all spreadsheets.
But I would say that one in the US could get away wtih a SMS free system if it had a decent mobile web interface or application, or even just hooked into another service which provided the 2 way SMS relaying.
http://www.google.com/search?q=laconica+OR+iden...
(See the first result.)
Going back to the Visicalc example, there were competitors -- SuperCalc,
Multiplan. They filled niches that VC didn't reach, and while they weren't
juggernauts they made a lot of money and got a lot of users.
Maybe Identi.ca will be one of those, but I don't see it on track to being a
1-2-3.
All this imho, ymmv.
This happened in a decentralized way on personal computers with file formats (i.e. the 1-2-3 worksheet became the transferrable standard), but it's trickier in the case of microblogging on the Internet.
The part of identi.ca I found intriguing is that it's architected to be distributed. I haven't yet seen that for Twitter (i.e. I don't see Twitter developers saying that you could host on your own domain, and then syndicate everywhere), although I might have missed something. I was listening to a podcast on identi.ca where they're already hitting the issue of reconciling userids across distributed identi.ca sites. (Do we all have to standardize on OpenID rather than Twitter IDs, then?)
1. Host it on my domain
2. Add Disqus comments
3. Attach (post, really) photos, video, audio
4. Completely customize the HTML and CSS presentation
5. Invite other people as either viewers of the blog (if it's created as a private blog) or admin (so they can post to it as well)
6. I have a dashboard that shows me the feed for everyone that I follow
7. It has a (very basic) API.
It's not:
1. Open source
2. Built for plugins
3. Portable wrt your data
4. SMS enabled (though it does support publishing via email and IM)
It is not a Twitter clone. That's #0 and very important.
"Web CMS just duplicates what you can already do with ssh/emacs and ftp. Except worse."
"A blogging system is just a CMS with a particular template, what's the big deal?"
And now "Twitter is just a type of blog."
Slapping a Twitter template on WordPress is different in all kinds of ways from actual Twitter. You're glossing over all kinds of little differences -- presumably as "trivial" -- that are the crucial reason Twitter is where it is.
It doesn't ask you to type a headline in your post. It doesn't allow you to edit a post, ever. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The little things make all the difference. Trivial isn't trivial.
Despite reading 80~90% of his posts on Twitter, I'm still unable to fathom/grasp/understand what mercurial elements of Twitter make the idea of "a thousand Twitters" not only such a compelling idea but also one that needs such great effort to create. I'm of the opinion that the appeal of Twitter is that it's a nexus of the blurbs, and when you try to break Twitter up and move away from that shape, you're entering into a problem domain that RSS already solved some years ago. That said, I also think if Dave Winer thinks there's something to it, there's probably something I'm missing and therefore shouldn't dismiss the idea.
So, I don't mean to imply Twitter is just another form of blogging from a user perspective...I just am not sure why from a technical standpoint, a blogging system couldn't work for what he wants, especially since Wordpress allows for editable templates, gadgets, etc.
wrote myself. It's so weird to have someone who reads my blog explain to me
how blogging works. I want to ask you -- have you been paying attention at
all? Seriously, let's get back on track here. This is a rabbit hole.
"Twitter is an ideal medium to inject fake facts into society..."
-- Fake Facts on Twitter
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/f...
Being a well-established programmer yourself, plus well aware of various problems society is having already with non-credible info on the net, I'd be interested to see your opinion on this, and what might be done to minimize it.
in the room when he said he knew why SOAP was developed (he attributed a
nefarious purpose) and he was wrong. I got up and said so, but if I hadn't
been there, it would have gotten on the record without challenge. He didn't
even retract it after I told him he got it wrong. So I guess he knows
something about injecting fake facts and all he needed was a microphone and
a stage. :-)
Regards,
Subhankar Ray
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2
Cheers!
Twitter is far from perfect, but it has the kind of maddening growth and dead-simple interface like Craigslist, that makes it sticky and hard to migrate the user-base to something better.
That's like saying we couldn't imagine anything good coming of people splintering off from LiveJournal and Blogger to implement blogs on their own sites, but here we are in 2009 with Wordpress.org software for all. Twitter is just another that will get copied and xeroxed across the Internet so that it can freely evolve into the next better thing.
Even more, if there was a way to gradually "dial back" tweet inputs from folks until you reach a comfortable level, and temporarily turn on/off if they were blasting a lot of tweets, for example from a conference that was/wasn't of interest, that would take Twitter or a clone (or even better, something that consolidated streams like Friendfeed) to a whole new level.
to ship it with that as the default app. Then when the power user lifts the
hood they'll see the possibilities, but at first will see something insanely
familiar.
That leads to two-ish questions:
* is my experience of twitter really that dramatically different from yours (and is either one common?)
* a big reason people stick to twitter at all (given the clones) is network effect, and the ease of discovering new people from the people you already know - do you see any way that a "personal" twitter would still provide that? (I guess the real question there is "is that on your list or not" and if it is, do you see it as having an engineering solution, or do you see a way around it?)
-- you guys have all assumed that this is a set of feature requests from a
user. Not so. Read today's piece to see the other side, why there will be
many twitters. And it isn't about you either. There are a lot more users out
there coming in the future than are with twitter.com today. It looks like a
lot viewed from the past, but there are a lot more users to come.
Twiggler uses the generic LM stream library, so the stream contents can come from as many sources as you like.
Folders can be set up to contain whatever you like: images, docs, links, maps etc
To tweet or post an item, you would just drag the item from the folder into the tweet box.
This is not hoaxware. The demo is a real web app.
D.
It's the one really big protocol we don't have.
Editor. But I always seem to find something more interesting, or I go for a
trip or take a nap. I don't have the same drive I used to back when we used
to hang out.