It's Time for an Open Twitter

http://justinvincent.com/page/1972/its-time-for-an-open-twitter

by jv22222 • 14 years ago

38 44 14 years ago

bencevans3• 14 years ago

We need something along the lines of Diaspora (Open and Distributed). This would encourage geeks to develop on the platform due to it being distributed it would be hard/impossible to shutdown thus shall be around for ever (Twitter might not be). And due to the openness of the codebase etc people would start setting up hosts (Just like Wordpress or Diaspora etc.)

jv222224• 14 years ago

Are you thinking something like Wordpress meets Twitter?

bencevans3• 14 years ago

Kind of but not Wordpress as Wordpress is far too bloated for 140 char status's. I'd relate it more to Diaspora that Wordpress personally.

bencevans3• 14 years ago

Take a look at StatusNet. That's effectively a Open Source Twitter Clone.

mhurron• 14 years ago

Because Diaspora has done so well.

The number of people that care about why Diaspora exists and why a Twitter clone in the same vein would exist is extremely small. Small userbase means the service is basically dead on arrival.

weego• 14 years ago

Completely this. Developers seem to think that the business stances Facebook and Twitter take can be solved purely with more development. They can't be. The problem is hearts and minds of users.

flatline3• 14 years ago

Diaspora was technologically stunted. It was ridiculous to expect extremely junior developers to design and build a distributed messaging system.

anuraj• 14 years ago

My best wishes. Will contribute by code and kind. And the day such a service exists, I am closing my twitter accounts.

Shish2k2• 14 years ago

I wonder how hard it would be to add a stalking function to an IRC server, so you can follow someone and see all their public messages; and then log messages so recent chat can be viewed by looking at a channel... are there any other reasons to use twitter over IRC? :P

cdcarter3• 14 years ago

Wouldn't you always have to be connected, that way?

e-dard• 14 years ago

An alternative to Twitter has existed since 2008. It's called identi.ca

http://identi.ca/

The issue is getting people to start using such a service.

jv222224• 14 years ago

If app.net can get the press it has gotten it probably means that the marketplace has reached boiling point. I'm thinking developers and many twitter users are ready for a more reliable and trust-able system.

ecaron• 14 years ago

How does the "marketplace has reached boiling point [with Twitter]", for app.net, differ from the marketplace reaching a boiling point with Facebook -> DIASPORA*, yet the trends speak pretty loudly (http://www.google.com/trends/?q=diaspora) that boiling point & press != success.

I'm hopeful to see app.net take off, but have been unable to find any arguments/discussions talking about how app.net will succeed where DIASPORA failed.

(Ignoring the obvious of having a better name, of course!)

lucian3032• 14 years ago

If you include trustable, the system and its parent company/organization could not reside in the US.

emilsedgh• 14 years ago

People in HackerNews tend to ignore things that have no 'funding', 'VC', 'capital', 'investment', 'startup' or related terminology.

In this very same thread people are mentioning that an open, distributed system is needed or that they'Will contribute by code and kind'.

And identi.ca is not even mentioned in the article.

Disclaimer: Im not trying to be offensive through other posters. They may simply not know about identi.ca. But that proves my point even more. Twitter and app.net have been discussed so much in the past few weeks. Identi.ca barely got any attention.

riffic3• 14 years ago

Identi.ca is not the alternative; it is a site which runs software called StatusNet.

This is like saying Wordpress.com is the alternative to Blogger. The alternative is the software which runs the site.

Most importantly, this software needs to speak a standardized protocol. Luckily, this protocol exists -- it is called OStatus.

jiaaro• 14 years ago

I like the idea of a 501c3 twitter competitor. It would be like wikipedia business-wise I guess.

Centralization has it's benefits, and they could be maintained without all the crap that's happening with twitter right now.

cdcarter3• 14 years ago

A 501c3 twitter is almost a brilliant solution. What grantmaker wouldn't want to support an organization dedicated to people's speech and open journalism? Valuing extensibility, openness, and free access, the mission is strong and the market is there. If Caldwell wanted to move this way, and offer $50 sustaining memberships for new features and $100 memberships for developers, nobody would blame him and all of a sudden he's open to some amazing funding opportunities.

fomojola• 14 years ago

Amazing funding opportunities perhaps, but not so great profit opportunities. Let's not forget: app.net is actually looking to make a profit (an excellent idea, if you ask me), not just replace Twitter.

andy_herbert• 14 years ago

I'm no zealot, but arguably it's always time for an open alternative to any service or product.

hahainternet3• 14 years ago

How about we just use XMPP. You know, the currently existing, extensible, email address syntax using distributed messaging platform?

Why does nobody seem to think of this?

Shish2k2• 14 years ago

Does XMPP allow you to follow a person and see all their public messages as they're posted? Does it allow you to see historic posts for a user? Can you search the network for all messages with a given tag, and get a live stream of updates? Can you see trending tags?

hahainternet3• 14 years ago

XMPP is extensible, so the answer could be 'yes'.

However, the actual answers are 1. Yes 2. Yes 3. Potentially 4. Yes 5. Potentially

Instead of having central aggregation, the free market would drive sites aggregating users messages to improve their features. You could sign up by just adding the site to your list.

Of course, it would require some work and a draft standard. I'm not saying it's perfect. Apparently identi.ca has a federation system too.

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

If we're looking at existing protocols for multicast store-and-forward, XMPP requires extensions for some of what SMTP already has.

hahainternet3• 14 years ago

Sure, really we'd be better off replacing them all with something designed along the lines of XMPP but by a modern committee focusing on a few limited features.

The idea of it being a single non profit site seems terrible in comparison.

gcampbell• 14 years ago

http://onesocialweb.org/ had the same idea (and a fair amount of code!), although it seems to be a bit dormant at the moment.

Todd• 14 years ago

XMPP is probably the best approach. I'm currently investigating this path myself. The disparate set of alternative protocols that app.net is considering are the same ones that diaspora* used. The result is a server that speaks several overlapping protocols.

In order to be successful, what this space really needs is a de facto server, like Sendmail, but one that's easy to set up and configure. Over time, this would make it possible to have a critical mass of compatible servers that speak the same set of XEP extensions. There are many open source XMPP servers. I think one reason this hasn't happened already is that most of them are difficult to set up and configure.

lucian3032• 14 years ago

"How can one commercial company be allowed to own a protocol such as http or email?"

Twitter's "protocol" is not a protocol but an API that runs on top of HTTP and they created it. The ONLY responsibility Twitter has as a corporation is to do whatever it takes to make the largest profit. If it failed at this, it would actually be in violation of the law as that is the purpose of a corporation.

The world isn't entitled to anything Twitter builds.

icebraining3• 14 years ago

You're missing the point amidst your rage. The author means protocol as an abstract mechanism, not a specific implementation. Email is not a specific protocol either - I can receive email using JSON over HTTP - but a abstract mechanism that is implemented by a collection of those.

And that's not Twitter irresponsibility; its responsibility is to do whatever its owners want it to, following the law. Especially since it's a private company, not a public one.

The world isn't entitled to anything Twitter builds.

Nobody says it is. The article is saying that Twitter is not entitled to be the sole mechanism for distributing Twit-like messages, and that we should build and use a different one.

slantyyz3• 14 years ago

>> The world isn't entitled to anything Twitter builds.

>> Nobody says it is.

I would say the choice of wording by the OP suggests otherwise.

From the OP:

>> Twitter has the power to topple regimes, but by following advertising dollars they are building a walled garden and making anti-competative (link to: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/) decisions.

If I'm not mistaken, the OP characterizes Twitter's imposing of developer unfriendly guidelines as anti-competitive, which it is not. If Twitter was being anti-competitive, they would be preventing competing platforms like App.Net from existing - and that's not what's happening. Limiting what is essentially a "free ride" is not anticompetitive.

From the same paragraph:

>> It does not bode well for our world that such a commercially driven company should wield so much power and be the epicenter of global conversation.

As far as I know, all companies are commercially driven. Twitter wields power because people like to use it. But so does Facebook. That the author tried to "build a business on Twitter’s platform for the past 3 years" and then be upset by Twitter's change of heart suggests a little sour grapes on his part.

Further:

>> Dalton Caldwell has an interesting idea, but I don’t think it will end the Twitter monopoly

While Twitter is the market leader, it does not have a monopoly on "status updates". The last time I checked my Facebook feed, it was full of the same type of updates that Twitter provides, and Facebook is pretty popular. Google+ is also a well funded competitor to Twitter.

vannevar• 14 years ago

It would be relatively easy to build a Twitter service on top of email. Participating email providers would give every email account its own listserv account. Followers would be subscribed to the list. Tweet emails would have only a 144-character subject, no body (plus any multimedia attachments). You could still use your email normally, but also access the full Twitter functionality with a special client via the web, phone, or computer. Anyone with a normal email account could follow you, though they would have to have an account with a participating email provider in order to tweet or retweet. If a couple of the big players implemented it, the service would have critical mass overnight.

slantyyz3• 14 years ago

Why not build it on NNTP?

riffic3• 14 years ago

this wheel already exists. it does not need to be reinvented.

http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/

http://ostatus.org/about/

brianfryer• 14 years ago

And Automattic is the company to build it.

eddy23• 14 years ago

from http://www.thimbl.net/ "Thimbl, the free, open source, distributed micro-blogging platform. If you're weary of corporations hi-jacking your updates to make money, or if being locked in to one micro-blogging platform tires you — well, then Thimbl is for you!"

http://www.thimbl.net/faq.html "Isn't this just like identi.ca/ostatus.net?

The similarity is only superficial, in that we draw upon similarities with web2.0 platforms in how we communicate our use-case.

Diaspora, Crabgrass, NoseRub, StatusNet, identi.ca and the rest are just web-apps with some sort of federation bolted-on. None of them are truly distributed multi-tier systems like the classic internet applications such as email, usenet, irc, or finger. Thimbl, on the other hand, is just a finger & SSH client that illustrates that "microblogging" has already been possible on the internet for decades. It's done by simply presenting the data differently and making it look like the now-familiar Twitter interface. You don't need anything from the Thimbl project running on your server to participate in Thimbl, just the software that is already in your repository - namely SSH and xinetd/finger or compatible alternatives."

It's Time for an Open Twitter

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