Why Twitter is a Big Deal (2009)

by _pius • 13 years ago

104 43 13 years ago

malay• 13 years ago

I was almost positive I had read the idea of Twitter as a protocol before (or something very similar), even though on Twitter[1] pg notes he never published this specific piece despite having written it in 2009. I really appreciated the simplicity of thinking of Twitter that way, and the definition has stuck with me.

In case anyone else wanted to know where they read it, it's under Request for Startups, #3[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/338702876744482816

[2] http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

pg2• 13 years ago

Aha, that must be why I never published it. I turned it into an RFS instead.

bobz• 13 years ago

Paul, curious if your enthusiasm for twitter has waned in light of the direction they have taken since? Obviously it is still an influential platform, but the grand vision we all had doesn't seem to be materializing...

r00k• 13 years ago

Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company.

Makers of Twitter clients were eventually reminded of this fact in a rather painful way.

monsterix• 13 years ago

> Makers of Twitter clients were eventually reminded of this fact in a rather painful way.

Isn't this a risk with all federated protocols - private or public immaterial?

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

I would say not exactly: If you have a public protocol and it's intended to run in multiple places or in a distributed manner, then even if the rest of the world stops using it, you and your users can happily chug along in your own sandbox.

If it's only used or useful in the context of a privately-owned/controlled environment... then you're in trouble, or likely to get there..

austenallred• 13 years ago

I would say yes, but unfortunately most of those that took that gamble have been shut out. If Twitter were really smart about the whole thing, given the amount of money they have, they should let others develop off of their platforms and acquire them as they start to gain traction.

davewiner6• 13 years ago

It's not just Twitter clients anymore. Basically they're constantly turning off pieces of the protocol, or so effectively limiting them that they're turned off.

For example, it's no longer legal to display a tweet unless you use their rendering.

If you had asked anyone at Twitter in 2009 if they would ever do that, they would have (probably) said no.

PG was right, then -- it had all the trappings of a new internet protocol, and therefore was almost a miracle. Except for the catch, which he also noticed -- that a private company could change the deal at any time. And they did.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

Ahh, the days when Twitter wondered if they were the 'pulse of the planet'. http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...

Such a stark difference between then and now.

danielrakh• 13 years ago

Just wondering...why is it wrong for a private company to take control of their product and user experience? It's their service, why can't they set certain protocols on how to use it?

mrwnmonm• 13 years ago

does this definition applied to tumblr too?

mehrzad2• 13 years ago

Since Tumblr has supported multimedia content for a while, I'd say no. Twitter was (and is still mostly) text only. Protocols don't have to be text-only, but that's what makes Twitter feel like one, I guess? Just my two cents.

lmm• 13 years ago

To my mind the fact that including pictures or video is less ad-hoc with Tumblr makes it more of a protocol, not less. Honestly Twitter doesn't feel particularly special to me - Facebook, Google+, even Livejournal feel like they're the same "kind of thing". Heck, at times Youtube behaves the same way. But I never got hugely into twitter, maybe it's different if you're a real fan.

bsaul• 13 years ago

Because publishing a web page on any blog site lets you specify the recipients ? To be a "protocol" imply a sort of "standard" shared , improved and used by different "actors" ( that's the reason for a protocol : two different people aggreing on a way to communicate). Twitter has always been centralized and closed in that sense.

why-el• 13 years ago

Agreed. Twitter is in no sense a protocol. I think it became a great deal once people realized it is the only place for real time information flow, or at least that's how it's perceived among the Twitter users I know.

davewiner6• 13 years ago

Tweets do have recipients, which makes them different from a web page.

At the next level up from the one you describe it is very much a protocol.

Users get to decide whose tweets they follow and don't. And senders can block receivers if they want to. Twitter may have a very small something to say about that (spam, community standards) but for the most that's a free choice on the part of both the sender and the receiver.

dmazin3• 13 years ago

It is intellectually weak to post a predictive piece that you wrote in 2009 after it's come true.

Shog9• 13 years ago

Just think how much more enjoyable it would be if futurists kept their analyses and predictions to themselves until there was some actual evidence to support them though.

I predict that as a group they'd be much more respected.

Of course, we'd have to come up with a new name for them. "Histori...sts"

eksith3• 13 years ago

Or "Ex-Post-Revelationists"?

eksith3• 13 years ago

When is a repost justified if not when it comes true? It would still be justified if the prediction was spectacularly off, in which case we can all have a good laugh.

dmazin3• 13 years ago

It's not a repost, pg didn't publish this until now.

trosenbaum• 13 years ago

The author (pg) did not post this link, _pius did.

Tycho• 13 years ago

Yes, I thought this also. It's a protocol like email or IRC, except it's privately owned. And it's actually suited to being monopolised by a single company.

I also wondered if you could characterise something like Facebook the same way. If you strip away all the extra functions, you have a protocol for setting up a private network of friends, identified by their real names, who can then broadcast to each other. Other social networks didn't have quite the same setup - not private by default, not real names.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.

They had an opportunity to be a free and open platform that spurns innovation instead they stifle it and impose ridiculous restrictions upon those who can only make the service better. In the beginning Twitter was a great platform to build on, but no doubt due to growing pressure to make money, Twitter have driven away a large number of developers, maybe Twitter will be fine without them but for how long?

glomph• 13 years ago

spurs?

Aqueous• 13 years ago

I wouldn't really call it a protocol. If Twitter is a protocol, then every exposed JSON-emitting API is a protocol - and perhaps that's true. But Twitter isn't unique in that respect. People have been publishing messages without specified recipients for a long time - it's called broadcasting, or publishing, or web publishing.

I wouldn't say the recipients are totally unspecified, either.

What makes Twitter unique is the artificial limit imposed on messages that can be broadcasted indiscriminately. And that makes it more of a new form of communication than any kind of protocol. It leads to a new form of expression, and a new way of getting a fairly accurate global view of the attitudes and cultural tides that are flowing through humanity in real time. That does make it truly earth shaking.

li-ch• 13 years ago

Just out of curiosity, is there an open source twitter-like protocol?

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

There is OStatus, supported by rstatus, diaspora, and status.net.

Why Twitter is a Big Deal (2009)

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