

Twitter's arbitrariness: do we need a dist'd protocol, not a central service? - ColinWright

Watching various tweets going past in the light of the NBC fiasco, and several people are suggesting that we should have an email-like protocol so we can develop a Twitter-like system with multiple providers, similar to how we now have multiple email servers.<p>Surely this can't be too hard to design and implement - most likely the impossible challenge is the chicken-and-egg problem - how can you get people to use it.
======
ammmir
Protocols are nearly impossible to market to consumers; services and apps are
what people want. Whether it'll be SMTP Lite, P2P HTTP, or whatever, doesn't
matter at this point.

I think what's missing is a compelling user experience that's decentralized by
its nature. Even the terminology needs to be thought out:

email : {Gmail, Hotmail, ...} :: ____ : {Twitter, Facebook, ...}

maybe ____ is "stream" as in "what's your stream address?"

The technology side is exciting, but the UX needs to be nailed before
bothering with it. As for adoption, there are a ton of social networking
clients out there, I'm sure you could convince a few to adopt this, maybe by
starting with a niche first.

~~~
ColinWright
Absolutely people want a service, but to build that service - which will be
done by hackers - we need to have a protocol to work to.

But you're right - we need to nail the user experience.

------
debacle
I think it's important to replace Twitter with an open protocol _if Twitter as
a platform has value_.

I would argue that it doesn't.

Twitter, in the social sense, has value for users on both sides as a corral of
content consumers and producers. Twitter, in the technical sense, offers very
little - the only special consideration is that I can send an SMS message from
my phone and it will appear on a website, but there are many other services
that provide this functionality. The reason I use Twitter is that it's free.

------
zeruch
"do we need a dist'd protocol, not a central service?"

Short answer: yes. The communication model/platform has viability, but
implementation(s) would be what makes or breaks it.

Obvious I know, but it bears repeating.

------
mikegreenspan
Have you checked out what we're doing at <http://join.app.net>?

