DISQUS

octavio · 8 months ago

you will be so embarrassed you wrote this a couple of years from now.

dave · 8 months ago

I've got a long trail behind me, and there aren't many things I'm embarassed
to have written. Actually I can't think of a single thing. And I have almost
15 years of archives up on the web. Just sayin.

Hmmm · 8 months ago

Has anyone noticed the popular names in tech have double letters: Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yammer, Mozilla, Seesmic, etc. Hulu sounds similar enough, but should they add another 'u' for good measure? Huulu or Huluu, or maybe even Huloo?

Reminds me of the plot in the movie "Man of the Year" starring Robin Williams.

AAfter Search · 7 months ago

You are right.. another one http://AAfter.com web search :-)

MindaugasDagys · 8 months ago

Dave, you rarely mention track. Do you leave the subject solely to Steve Gillmor?

dave · 8 months ago

Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.

Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.

Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.

Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.

Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.

Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.
Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track. Track.

Does that make up for it? :-)

Chris Heath · 8 months ago

Thanks for making my day Dave. :-)
and, no - it probably doesn't make up for it ... steve probably has you by a few still...

stevegillmor · 8 months ago

yes

Jesse Stay · 8 months ago

ROFL! (and same goes for Steve's response)

Jesse Stay · 4 months ago

Is there a tune to that?

MarinaMartin · 8 months ago

So where do you see Laconi.ca playing in this (if anywhere)? And do you envision these competitors as true competitors -- walled gardens -- or as networks with the capability to talk to one another? AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve once only allowed members to email other members, but today email is a universal medium and we can send messages to anyone on any service. That's what I expect to happen with Twitter, and while I generally prefer not to partake in any parade with Oprah at the helm, hey, if it gets the ball rolling out of this one single silo...

dave · 8 months ago

In the big picture who makes the software doesn't really matter -- if you
want to get Laconi.ca into position for this opportunity take a look at my
list in yesterday's post -- it's the other half of the story. Each of these
systems will have to start as a clone of Twitter but have the ability to
evolve competitively and in response to user feature requests. My readers
seem to want to endlessly talk about which software will win, I don't care.

Jesse Stay · 8 months ago

Check out Brian Hendrickson's OpenMicroblogger - his Twitteronia just launched real-time updates, competing with FriendFeed. I wonder if he'll also be releasing this with his OpenMicroblogger OSS code.

kylehase · 8 months ago

You make a good point. I would certainly not want to have to load a new Twhirl window for every separate network. OMB is a good start but if there will be hundreds or thousands of networks, each with interesting people worth following, the system will need to evolve to a global standard like how email evolved in the early days of the net.

fahrni · 8 months ago

Dave, I'm not sure if this fits into a Twitter category, it's more like a chat room? But it may lead to other ideas because it's discussion based, and you can have public chat or private chat. It's called tapingya.com and if you have a google account you're ready to roll.

thomaspower · 8 months ago

Dave you are so smart its scary. Why didn't you mention the Twitter Search threat to Google?

dave · 8 months ago

Because I don't think that's what all this is about. (And thanks for the
compliment!)

jonknee · 8 months ago

Hollywood movies may cost many times more than Twitter got in VC, but they make money. Twitter loses it. Figure out how to make a lot of cash by hosting micro blogging networks and you'll finally see your dream come true.

dave · 8 months ago

Same way that Good Morning America makes money. Celebs go online and chat up
their latest money making project. I thought by now that was obvious, but I
guess not.

jonknee · 8 months ago

Good Morning America makes money by selling 30-second TV ads (and makes lots of it, about $600m of ads are sold annually for GMA). They do cross promotion, but that doesn't pay the bills. They also promote other people's stuff, which would be considered a loss if you're counting self promotion as a gain. A free "host your own twitter" isn't going to work the same way GMA does.

Twitter is losing money, opening the platform up which will dilute their brand will only increase their burn rate.

kosso · 8 months ago

exactly.
great post.

flexible white labels all the way. ;)

that's the way I'm heading. Building and offering 'your own personal/company twitter', 'your own personal/company flickr', 'your own personal/company YouTube'..etc..etc.. all with the data to neatly connect and thread it all together, if need be. ;)

Michael Fidler · 8 months ago

I’m glad that you mentioned the low cost involved starting twitter. Obviously, a clone should cost a fraction of this price. One third of a films budget goes towards marketing. If the budget is $300 Million, that’s a nice pile of cash to spread around. I noticed yesterday that Hugh Jackman is (@RealHughJackman) is on twitter now. He’s apparently promoting his new film Wolverine, as well as himself. I suspect he’s doing this for Oprah, after reading some of his tweets. However, it won’t be long, until the studio’s start including twitter appearances in their contracts. If they’re going to shell money for this type of thing, it only makes sense for the Studio’s to have their own real-time networks. If it makes sense for the studios, it should make sense for Apple, etc. Assuming this is true, what would be a fair amount to charge for a clone?

dave · 8 months ago

The price is going to be pretty low. But the first ones are going to make
some good money, because the supply is still limited.

Sheryl Breuker · 8 months ago

I think you're on to something. The only thing I wonder is why haven't they already taken open jaiku and run with it? It would be relatively simple to get that. Jaiku isn't so different from twitter, really. Just a thought...

dave · 8 months ago

It's different enough. If Twitter is skiing, Jaiku is snowboarding.

Sheryl Breuker · 8 months ago

Snow boarding is pretty niche. Ok, so no snowboarding. How long would you project it's going to take? Seems to me old media is looking for a foothold right now...doing a fair amount of scrambling.

dave · 8 months ago

Ev and Biz are making "old media" the hippest media guys around.

They're selling new media out, and as far as I can tell they're not getting
paid bupkis for it.

I explained this last week in this piece:

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/18/wha...

"A new kind of media is booting up, and Twiitter should have been a leading
proponent of it. Okay if the big media types want to use it, no problem --
but don't go on their shows and support them over the individual users.
You're just inviting backlash."

EhabM · 8 months ago

I think Twitter hit mainstream before Jaiku could. Esp with twitter being on the news almost everyday.

neekolas · 8 months ago

I'd love to know why you classify Twitter as a media company and not a communications one.

So far, they have kept themselves very agnostic towards the content on the service, only banning accounts for follow-SPAM-ing. They do not do deals with any of their users and even turned down Jason Calcanis' offer to buy a spot on their "recommended" section.

Seems like they want to be a broad communications platform. Hopefully they will become interoperable with other networks, including 2-way following with Laconica, so that these new networks can become part of the Twitter ecosystem instead of fracturing it, but it doesn't seem to be the direction they are going. There is plenty they can do to make media companies happy simply by improving the core Twitter product and API (more customization of design, marketplace for names, multimedia support, etc.). They might even be able to charge for that stuff. So, why let Oprah take her hordes of women in sweatpants elsewhere?

dave · 8 months ago

I think they would have done better if they had strict rules for not getting
involved with content and stuck to them, then you'd be right they wouldn't
be a media company and they could strictly be a service provide to media
companies, and rake in the big bucks without having to worry about
competition. But they have totally gotten involved in the content, from
inflating follower counts for their friends, to handing over people's
accounts to people who (again friends) ask for them. This isn't something
you can mess with, and they've been all over the map. This is the #1 reason
why they're inviting the competition.

neekolas · 8 months ago

You're right that this is a problem for them, but I don't think it's a deliberate part of their strategy. I suspect this is just a case of unexpectedly giving a few people a massive amount of power without time to adjust their organization to the responsibility of it. There does seem to be an acceptance that Twitter is too big to control or successfully manage, and that is why they are so reliant on the API and Twitter apps for innovations on top of the service.

dave · 8 months ago

If I had to bet on it -- I'd bet that you nailed it.

Erik · 8 months ago

Twitter has a strategy? The product essentially hasn't changed in two years. Frankly, it still sucks, but the nature of short-from content with asymmetric following is inherently addictive. They fell backwards into this explosive growth.

Jesse Stay · 8 months ago

It's already happening. I've talked to multiple large brands already looking to use Laconi.ca to do this. You'll recognize them when they launch. TodaysMama just set up their own network for Moms. I hope Twitter and FriendFeed are noticing this. Also see my article on LouisGray last year, using ESPN as an example: http://louisgray.com/live/2008/08/identica-and-...

danja · 8 months ago

Right.

Note that laconi.ca has a couple of differentiating characteristics:

1. it's open source
2. it has considerably better connection to the Web of Data than Twitter (supporting RSS/RDF and FOAF) - which means it'll be far more straightforward to interconnect independent systems compared to those using semi-proprietary APIs

Only a subjective observation, but 2. does seem to make it more appealing to geeks than Twitter, e.g. http://identi.ca/timbl

Then again, it's not either-or, clients like Gwibber can post/read from multiple microblogging networks.

John Moore · 8 months ago

Dave, I couldn't agree more. Twitter is simply the next generation of platforms that have come before (a great combination of IM, RSS, and special sauce). Twitter, however, can thrive if it becomes both a social media platform as well as a building block for other platforms. Here's what I mean:

- It has provided the masses with another method of communicating and sharing information. It is logical that competitors will jump in and build semi-private "Twitters" to better serve niche markets. They will thrive but not grow too large. Twitter should consider providing the framework to these niche competitors, keeping users within their network while allowing a semi-competitive group of companies to form.
- Twitter itself should then drive some of it's core traffic to these niche platforms, while allowing itself to grow as both an educational and marketing platform. As I've blogged in the past, it has the making of a great social media marketing platform (http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/the-...) .

Thanks for sharing your insights, they are always great.

John
http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore

Thao Ly · 8 months ago

Interesting post and extremely foretelling. I wonder if people will feel worried that Twitter is becoming an all too powerful media network?

shokk · 8 months ago

FriendFeed needs a clone that will hook into FriendFeed itself, where the clone is the lite version and FriendFeed itself is the advanced version. This could lead to a Pro or advertiser based system. The time is now to fork the Twitter idea. Will this FriendFeed clone be ready with features that Twitter doesn't have, while hooking into it to co-opt everyone back into FriendFeed? Will it be OAuth ready while Twitter is still getting its feelers out for that. Do users care about that stuff? Is FriendFeed even ready for that kind of server load?

Kubric · 8 months ago

There won't be many twitters. If there were going to be, we'd see the successful seeds of them already. There have been numerous clones already, and they all have the same problem: traction. You want your own twitter? You can do that now; why not get started? Oh yeah, that's right: you'd need to keep pimping Winerer over on the real Twitter in order for people to find out about it and keep them coming back. It's kind of like suggesting that in two years there will be many Googles. There are plenty of other search engines, but for the most part, everyone keeps coming back to Google.

EhabM · 8 months ago

wow. A very insightful article. I can see people buying and selling twitter names like domain names.

Sheamus · 8 months ago

If Twitter is the success it appears to be, why wouldn't and couldn't there be just one of them? There's only one Google. One eBay. There are competitors, but they're jokes, relatively.

Something similar may surpass Twitter.com as a micro-blogging network - much like Google did with Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista and so on - but I don't see any reason why diluting the news feed would be productive for the internet, and because of that reason I don't see it happening. Lots of Twitters = lots of small clusters of noise, as opposed to one large one you can filter to your whim. What might happen, I feel, is one major aggregator could become the 'Twitter' by collating the information of everybody else, but I still think that's less likely that having one main network that everybody is a part of. Barring a couple of overly-hyped, under-successful attempts, I don't see any reason why every celebrity under the sun is going to go on their own. There's a lot of money to be made for the best network; the others are likely to be quickly-forgotten fodder.

BarbaraKB · 8 months ago

Dave, you make great points *but* use of words "twitter" and "tweeting" growing like "google" and "googling" once did. At some point, it becomes not about the tech. I would argue others have tried (Jaiku, identi.ca, Plurk, FriendFeed, Yammer) to unseat Twitter and have failed. Why? Twitter remained simple and "open" enough for the general, non-tech user *like* a journalist from a major newspaper or blog who wanted immediate news and information. Peace to your day!

Srini Kumar · 8 months ago

Nobody down here is going to compete effectively with Twitter, but Friendfeed's very name is just *asking* to be Friendsterized. A celebrity-dominated Twitter sounds awful. I think there is a very big brand opportunity for "other Twitters" but I don't think celebrities is it.

j · 8 months ago

I agree following is a powerful feature other sites should use, but the opportnity is for twitter and fb to be the open network people use to distribute info and their info can be read anywhere. Twitter does this. It's hard to give users something worth visiting each day as a twitter feed has done, so really it's now the new rss feed, and ppl are welcome to make their own readers. Rss doesn't work as well to date because there's no easy way to connect with friends as well or present updates in as user friendly of a way. Ppl use fb connect bc it lifts conversion to logged in users and you get to publish to the stream. Same goes for using twitter to access all those active users. Twitter is offering distribution value you can't just build from scratch so easily for the same reasons you can't just rebuild fb. Both must be open though to make this all work without fear of getting locked in.

Erik · 8 months ago

"There's a lot of money to be made in these networks and it costs so little to start one. "

What money?

BradWilliamson · 7 months ago

Twitter has no more than a year to reinvent itself, or else it will die from the backlash it's destined to receive from all the users who started an account only to realize that they had no one to talk to.

Sheamus · 7 months ago

Who has no-one to talk to? You can look at the profiles of the smallest users (in a followers sense) and they're nearly all busy bees. You pays your money and makes your choice. I think the 'pick up and play' nature of Twitter is one of the main reasons why it works so well. Just follow a few people and have at it.

sull · 7 months ago

this sounds similar to my arguments about hulu.
eventually, the major networks will come back full circle to their senses and plant their media exclusively on their own damn site(s) and let people surf to them ike they surf to their tv channels. nothing new. hulu imo is destined to be left to dissipate or be absorbed by one of the partners... maybe left up for a while but ultimately, traffic will be encouraged to go to different urls setup for video distribution. ABC.com is a great example.

so yeah, you're right that eventually, after the initial hype and getting drunk on twitter.... the big peeps will be better suited to start their own real-time messaging services and stop giving free marketing to twitter.
like you said, it's not too hard considering the money that's already being spent and made by these mega-entities.

i personally like twitter and want them to conitnue to succeed. but i also want things federated and they should be part of that when it happens.

Twitter Quitters · 7 months ago

Now you can share why you choose to stay or quit twitter :) checkout http://www.twitters.in

Jesse Stay · 4 months ago

Well written, Dave! I agree completely.

Jesse Stay · 4 months ago

LOL - I just realized this was re-posted from awhile ago and I had already told you this. :-) Well, good read again, anyways.

uggworld · 2 months ago

ugg boots are a style of sheepskin boot, with wool as the inner lining and a tanned outer surface worn by both men and women.worn by girls with mini skirts, leggings, and with jeans tucked into the boots.ugg uk are also popular with boys, wearing jeans or tracksuit bottoms inside them most commonly.The natural properties of sheepskin results in thermostatic benefits. Thick fleecy fibres on the inner part of the ugg australia allows air to circulate and keep the feet at body temperature. Synthetic and faux fur boots do not have these properties and sheepskin boots are highly prized for their effectiveness. winter boots are designed to be worn without socks in order to maximize the benefits of sheepskin.