
What Twitter could have been - dalton
http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been
======
MicahWedemeyer
_Perhaps you think that the API-centric model would have never worked, and
that if the ad guys wouldn’t have won, Twitter would not be alive today.
Maybe._

I think this deserves a bit more attention. It's easy to point fingers and
make all kinds of what-if predictions, but just handwaving money aside in
favor of a poorly defined API utopia ignores the reality of running a
business.

~~~
runako
Agreed. It would be a much more compelling argument if there were examples of
successful API companies presented as possible models for Twitter as an API
company. (In addition to the example of Google as an advertising company.)

~~~
jusben1369
Yes I have to agree with the two of you. That was my first thought upon
finishing. It's odd Dalton doesn't define one or two solid examples of what
this successful cloud API could be.

~~~
dalton
I felt that discussing alternate business models was outside the scope of the
post for 2 reasons: 1) I am an outsider, and no one understands what could or
could not work better than the people working at Twitter. I am not sure what
the pro-API camp inside of Twitter had in mind. 2) Debating which model would
work better would derail the points I wanted to make in my post.

I do think there are several large cloud companies that have both their
"native" UI and rich/powerful APIs. For instance Salesforce, which my company
both pays for & extensively modifies and extends via their API. Given the
attention this post has attracted I may write a followup post just on this
topic.

~~~
ShawnBird
> Given the attention this post has attracted I may write a followup post just
> on this topic.

I hope you do, I am very interested in this topic and I would like to hear
what you say and what people have to say in response to it.

------
SwellJoe
A "firehose" API for the net would be awesome, but it probably needs to be
Open Source, in order to avoid being driven towards monetization. Of course,
without the drive to make money, Twitter may have never taken off quite the
way it did, and may have never had the money to spend on SMS and other
expenses they were dealing with in the beginning to create that firehose of
data.

The Open Source twitter clones (like identi.ca) have modeled what Twitter
became, mostly, rather than what Twitter could have been...so, as far as I
know, there isn't much out there that answers this description. I'd started
working on something I was calling SYSRSS years ago, which was to be a
realtime systems human and machine readable data stream protocol and
implementation, but never got a minimum viable product out the door, as I
could never quite figure out the right niche for such a thing. I think it may
have been too specific, though building on top of an existing popular data
format and protocol was probably a valid choice.

In short, I agree that Twitter could have been more awesome than what it is.
But, I don't know if I could have made it better, or that having the API guys
win would have succeeded. I haven't done any research into that field
lately...I wonder if there are any new developments in the Open Source world
for this kind of thing?

~~~
politician
Telehash is the Open Source "firehose API" you seek. The proposal describes a
DHT that routes JSON. However, it seems like I've been waiting for it for
years. Maybe it's the obscure telephone lingo that the API is described in
terms of that's discouraging would-be implementers, but it's nothing that a
good old facade can't fix.

<http://telehash.org/>

~~~
demachina
Telehash is radically decentralized. How do you get a firehose out of that? It
would be more like a point to point garden hose wouldnt it? I would like to be
proved wrong, but I think Twitter/centralized and Telehash/decentralized will
end up looking and acting like two very different services.

If the Twitter as an API group had won out the two best outcomes I can think
of are either a buy out from Google, or a move to a foundation like Wikipedia.
Google could afford to carry it, like it does Youtube, just so they could own
a huge firehose of information and use it elsewhere in search ads, without
trashing the stream with ads.

Needless to say founders looking to get rich wouldn't go for the low returns
of the foundation model but it would have been the best possible outcome for
the well being of the future Internet having and open, censorship resistant
message bus and API, assuming you could get enough donors to support it.

~~~
jeremie
With a telehash style distributed messaging bus you'd need to have clients opt
in to centralized reporting and analytics providers, like the library of
congress, internet archive, even commercial firehose companies like gnip, etc.

------
Alex3917
"One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API."

I think the real problem with this is that Twitter made an even more
fundamental mistake early on, which is that they only support text and not
data/microformats. That is, there is no way for a professor to tweet out the
homework in such a way that it automatically gets added to students'
dayplanners, no way to list something for sale in a globally searchable way,
no way to tweet out a dating profile, etc.

Twitter really should have been the company that enabled the semantic web and
became the de facto platform powering the entire thing.

~~~
rodp
Bravo!

When Twitter introduced annotations, I thought that was the beginning: soon,
we would have Twitter classifieds, Twitter marketplace, Twitter as a data
firehose for anything... All I was waiting for is annotations in the Search
API. I'm positive that's all that was needed to provide the initial
infrastructure for semantics -- the community would take care of the rest.
Unfortunatelly, not only has it never happened, but Twitter took an entirely
different course.

I can understand them, though. They had to start making money fast and took a
less risky road. But I can't help thinking: bugger, this could've been so much
more than celebrities and hashtags.

~~~
flogic
I understand how ads seem like a less risky road, but I really don't like
using Twitter's website. Nor, am I that crazed about their app. I can't be the
only one. It seems like a good way to lose users.

------
meanguy
I particularly disagree with the conclusion that Twitter would have become
some sort of magical panacea as opposed to the screenshot he provides:
[https://twitter.com/#!/daltonc/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitt...](https://twitter.com/#!/daltonc/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FAPZkZ1J1)

The problem there is yet another crappy "what's hot" or "what's trending" or
"what's popular" block. Google can't solve it for news, Netflix can't solve it
for movies, Amazon can't solve it for related products, and a half-borked,
underfunded API for accessing the Twitter firehose is unlikely to create an
ecosystem for startups that magically condense the entire world's real-time
chit-chat into something I find compelling.

Yet isn't that block fundamentally the (false) promise of Twitter? We'll let
you, Mr. Brandybrand [perhaps an individual], target your products and ideas
and political manifestos that change the world and the blog posts and cat
pictures and defamatory attacks and racist sentiments that don't -- somehow to
people who'll find it interesting?

The World's Fairs promised us flying cars; Hollywood promised us a flying
skateboard. Both still live on in our dreams, so I have a tough time thinking
"marketing" killed 'em.

Especially given Twitter's very public technology missteps. Hash exclamation
point, ya digg? Half a billion later and the site still loads correctly about
as often as Gawker does. He's bitching that an API can't party on their data?
Hell, I can't even retrieve my own direct messages from a year ago on the site
itself.

Meanwhile: somebody just replied in email with "HAHAHAHA!" Gmail inserted a
widget offering to translate it from Filipino and shows an ad for Coconuts
beside it. Coconuts! Meanwhile my last Twitter notification is in the Spam
folder.

Nope, this isn't "the marketing guys."

~~~
demachina
Trends on Twitter just aren't important enough for everyone to constantly cite
as to why Twitter sucks or why our species is doomed. Its just a source of
brief entertainment to see what large numbers of people you probably don't
have much in common with are obsessing over at the moment.

Effective Twitter usage is to follow large numbers of interesting people and
news sources and then look at the trending topics among the people you care
about, you have things in common with and whose opinions you value.
Unfortunately Twitter doesn't do trends for just your stream which is one of
the many reasons third party clients can rock and Twitter, the company, tends
to not rock.

------
EGreg
Nah. The internet was built to be decentralized with no single point of
failure. Twitter and facebook and other centralized services are not the
future. Cloud and tiers are fine as commodities, but having ONE company manage
ALL the infrastructure for a particular type of communication is not the
"internet way". The futurist in you shouldnt be upset.

Imagine if all email went through a single company's servers, and "fail whale"
meant you had to WAIT until Email.com was back up until you sent that file to
the coworker across the hall from you...

What we need is a protocol and a decentralized, open source reference
implementation.

------
Kerrick
A bit off topic, you totally psychologically hijacked me for a kudo. :-P

I was curious what the kudos were, so I hovered over the icon. It told me not
to move and started filling up, so I waited curiously. Finally, it counted
that as a kudo from me to you!

That said, you have a good point. They really have taken a different road
recently with their crackdown on the API. They've got every right do do so,
and they're making money doing it (always important for a company), but it
would've been really interesting to see the equivalent of an API-based SMS-
style nearly-ubiquitous service.

~~~
Rudism
That happened to me too the first time I saw a link to this blog on HN. But
now I'm wiser. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me, can't get fooled again.

~~~
darushimo
Agreed, although I periodically "give" a kudo just to see if the platform has
improved to allow one to revoke a kudo. It hasn't. It's a shame actual "kudos"
get conflated with "what's this thing do" over and over. Was the design aspect
overlooked or intentional? Either way It's a disrespectful UX error.

~~~
speednoise
If not intentional originally, defiantly intentional now:
<http://dcurt.is/unkudo/>

~~~
kamikazi
Wow, he's not fooling me with his rationalisations:

 _Here’s what it actually does: when you hover over the button, a CSS
transform animation is activated which fills the circle. After 1 second (the
length of the animation), it fires a request to the server which increments an
otherwise meaningless number by exactly one._

Simple response: If that number is meaningless, why give it a fancy animation,
why name it 'Kudos' (which even a non-techie would agree is equivalent to a
+1, Like whatever) and then why place such a meaningless element next to every
meaningful blogpost? If he just wants to amuse himself, may I propose random()
in whatever prog. language he uses to update some meaningless local variable.
I do like Dustin's blog, but it's sad to see the self-deception going on here
from an otherwise smart guy with loads of reputation to lose.

------
paulsutter
This feels like an opportunity. I'd love to hear a broader description of the
sorts of functionality that twitter could have become as a messaging API
instead of an ad driven business.

Anybody have any thoughts to share?

I wonder if twitter's early and longlasting scaling problems affected their
choice at all.

~~~
tmarthal
I know that when iOS 5.0 mentioned 'twitter integration' and BBM like
messaging, I had assumed (wrongly) that iOS was going to use twitter DMs in
the way that they are using iMessages now. This would be using a person's
twitter handle instead of the Apple ID associated with the iPhone. Like I
said, this did not come to pass, but it could have been used as a BBM-like
messaging service pre-iMessaging.

------
DennisP
As long as you have a centralized system, the entity that runs it has to make
money sooner or later.

What we need is a decentralized protocol that does what the "API Twitter"
could have done.

~~~
alttab
I think that's called HTTP. Then all you need is a place to search the
content, where hosting that is easier than hosting all the data. And that's
called google.

~~~
DennisP
HTTP doesn't have pubsub built in.

~~~
alttab
Rss? FTP?

~~~
DennisP
No. More real-time, more efficient than polling. You're not going to build
twitter on RSS alone.

This might qualify: <https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/>

------
EternalFury
Pie-in-the-sky companies have to make money eventually. Either you start
making money, or you'll have to do it later and that may disappoint some
people.

------
cletus
For a year or two I've predicted the ultimate demise of Twitter, which
probably means some kind of acquisition. I stand by that prediction. They have
hundreds of millions (if not billions) so it's not going to happen overnight
but it will happen.

What is Twitter? I see it as two things:

1\. Infrastructure: it is a means of sending thousands of short messages a
second to people in asymmetric relationships. Technically this isn't a hard
problem. There are many companies around who handle traffic many orders of
magnitude above this. The danger with infrastructure is that it will get
commoditized. The cost in terms of resources (bandwidth, CPU, power) is not
that high;

There are parallels between Twitter and SMS. SMS survives and is hugely
profitable because of the telco cartel that monopolizes it. Where hosting
companies will provide you with bandwidth for cents per GB, SMS costs
thousands if not millions of dollars per GB. That too will come to an end
eventually. What saves it now is all the players want to push their own
standards and they aren't interoperable. It's IM fiefdoms all over again.

2\. An audience. Twitter and its users have the ability to reach a large
number of people. Originally Twitter was envisioned as a means of real-time
status updates between normal people. My impression is that this use case is
basically dead. The vast majority of Twitter usage seems to be as a
communication tool by celebrities. There is a business in that but it isn't
the revolutionary communication tool it was once thought (and some still
think) it to be.

So the camps in question (the API camp and the ad camp) fit into the above.

Owning infrastructure can be hugely lucrative (eg SMS). History is full of
examples of this. Railroads, oil, telephony, etc. The problem is that you get
too big and the government will intervene.

Messaging infrastructure is too important for one party to own it. Email is
federated and open. The future of messaging is too (I believe) federated and
open.

So that leaves (2), the ad camp. The problem with advertising on Twitter is
the same as it is on Facebook: it's an unwelcome intrusion.

Perhaps Twitter could have (and may still be able to) build a display ad
business but Twitter is still not a particularly mainstream product (and IMHO
it doesn't look like it ever will be).

Perhaps Twitter could've had a subreddit/Facebook pages type hubrid model.
Upvoting of Tweets is possibly interesting.

Of course this faces the same problem Digg had: few things are globally
interesting. What's interesting to you is not necessarily interesting to me so
you changing what I see is again an intrusion.

Basically "content gateways" (like Digg, Slashdot, etc) were I believe
transitional. I don't believe you'll have a repeat of Digg moderators being
paid to promote stories. You can (and people do) pay celebrities to retweet
things but that still only goes to their followers. They have to consider
their brands and building and keeping their respective audiences too.

Those thinking Twitter should have an open firehose (or close to it) are
neglecting the reality that Twitter is a business and needs to make money
somehow. Open access to their content greatly diminishes that.

Lastly, quite a few people will speak of "betrayed" by Twitter over API
access. They also believe that developers were largely responsible for making
Twitter popular. As I said (just yesterday) that this is inevitable. Become
too successful and the platform subsumes you into their core offering (no one
wants core features controlled by third parties). Developers were I believe
largely incidental to Twitter's success. Twitter succeeded (as it were)
because people used it. To take credit for that as a developer community is
like saying that the automobile succeeded because of car wash stations and
autoshops selling rims.

EDIT: one last point. It's popular, particularly on HN, to simply build an
audience or something that scales without concern for monetization. I
certainly understand the logic behind this. Sometimes it works but sometimes
it doesn't.

Twitter hasn't come up with a scalable business model yet because there isn't
one. As much as founders can be praised for "swinging for the fences" and
going all in, sometimes the best outcome is to be acquired because what you've
developed isn't a viable independent business but could be an incredibly
valuable part of a wider portfolio of products.

~~~
waterlesscloud
My thought about the Twitter business model has always been that they
shouldn't charge for putting information into the stream, ala advertising.

They should charge for taking information out of the stream, like a polling
company, or consumer research, or business intelligence.

Not for the stream, but for the firehose. And for specialized analysis of the
firehose.

There would be massive value in knowing what everyone in the world is thinking
about in real time.

Getting there should have been their goal.

~~~
spudlyo
They do this already, minus the analysis. I think the problem is this just
isn't that big of a business.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I suspect the problem is more that they haven't found the way to make it that
big a business, not that it can't be.

Oh well, if they don't, someone else will down the line.

------
ethank
The sad part of this is that Twitter was going in this direction:

<http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html>

I don't think the reaction would be nearly as bad if Twitter was better at
making clients for their own service. They aren't very good at it. Twitter for
Mac (née Tweetie) is dying on the vine.

TweetBot is 10x better on iOS than the native client, and Osfoora on the
desktop.

Why not meet the challenge of an ecosystem in conjunction with ad revenue
rather than just blanket rule against it?

~~~
rkudeshi
I disagree that Twitter's official iPhone client is "bad." You may like
Tweetbot more, but I am a power user who actually prefers the official client.

It's not a question of good vs. bad, it's more like good vs. better (where
better is a personal preference).

~~~
ethank
Do you disagree that they have abandoned their native Mac client?

Personally I don't think the "Discover" tab is worth its real estate in the
menu.

------
MatthewPhillips
> One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. ...
> The other camp looked at Google’s advertising model for inspiration, and
> decided that building their own version of AdWords would be the right way to
> go.

There was a 3rd camp, those who wanted Twitter to become a protocol instead of
a silo. From the sounds of it this camp must have been especially small. It's
a shame, it was the only way to make it viable long-term.

~~~
adventureful
The only way to make what viable long term?

------
727374
What a bizarre post. A company could have entered a different market and
killed it 5 years ago... however that market has still yet to materialize,
whereas the market that the company actually entered was rather lucrative.
Also, Steve Jobs could have invented a company to build hover cars and that
company could have changed the world.

------
antirez
Would be cool to see a startup creating a "Twitter for computers" service. An
highly reliable system that can be used just to route messages via an API,
with a semantic similar to the one of twitter, to be used as a building
component for everything you need. Not sure about what a business model would
look like.

~~~
Elepsis
Wasn't this one of the basic premises of Notifo? As far as I recall, they
never did quite figure out the business model, though.

------
gregcohn
Great post. It seems like there are several different interpretations of what
an API-centric business model would have looked like: the "all the data in one
place" model, and the "communications bus for the internet" model. (These are
not mutually exclusive, necessarily.)

I always loved the idea of Twitter as a communications bus for the internet.
It probably would have been very challenging to monetize (though "we have all
the data" as a thing to sell isn't bad, it works well for google in a
search/1.0 context because they also have all the intent and all the UI around
it).

It makes me wonder how much this set of decisions was driven by the amount of
capital they raised and the need to demonstrate monetization.

It seems like deciding the business would be ad-supported was the first step
toward becoming MySpace2.0.

------
state
It seems to me that the potential success of the realtime API approach would
be reliant on impressive, profitable applications. Although I can think of a
few, I can't think of enough of them to argue against the AdWords approach,
which apparently drives revenue for now. If Twitter had chosen the API
direction initially it would have been partially on them to cultivate the
developer community required to make their strategy works — which could be
seen as orthogonal to developing a great product and solving infrastructure
problems.

In the long run these two approaches may not actually be at odds with one
another. AdWords-ish works for now, and as new apps are developed there may be
an opportunity to move back in that direction.

------
jazzychad
Not to mention their photo product (their partership with photobucket or
whatever) is pretty bad... Even the two links in this article that point to
twitter photos come up 404 on mobile... wtf. The third party tweet photo sites
are still better.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Twitter's mobile site is a complete joke. It wasn't until last week that I
could actually see a tweet somebody linked to.

What is more frustrating is I don't _ever_ want the mobile site (there's an
app for that). I just want to be able to see tweets people like to.

------
drawkbox
This post is relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552821> 'How
Software Companies Die'.

The engineers/product developers lost and the marketing won. It happens many
times because developers are busy building value while marketing/business is
scheming/planning/making deals. When this changes we will have more truly
awesome products I believe, when Japan was seriously winning they were
engineer and product focused but have business/marketing bloat destroying
these products nowadays. Making needs as much focus as marketing.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The "marketing screws companies up" meme is old and tired. Yes, bad marketing
sucks. So does bad engineering. The reality of creating a business is you need
to market it. It's one company in a thousand that can survive with no
marketing, and that happens purely by luck.

Marketing is actually really hard. The internet has also drastically altered
how marketing happens, since the conversation now needs to be two-way (not
just blasting out advertisements). The companies who do this the best don't
get credit for great marketing because it just appear natural.

What is worse about this meme is it becomes poisonous inside companies.
Instead of everybody working together to build the company, you can have
people trying to satisfy agendas. Engineers focus on technology instead of
products; marketing tells lies in an effort to force engineering down the path
they want.

The only thing about this meme that has any value is that, at its core, the
meme talks about providing _real_ value instead of _talking about_ value. But
it is the height of arrogance to believe only engineers can create something
of value.

~~~
lazylland
People just don't seem to be comfortable with grey. And this is a problem I
especially see with newer devs: there _has_ to be _one_ right way that _fully_
solves a problem.

The balancing act between seat-of-the-pants thinking and methodical problem
solving is THE key to business survival.

------
nivertech
TL;DR: This thread contemplating "Diaspora* for Twitter"

------
kgosser
Last year I wrote about Twitter as a platform for life:

[http://krisgosser.com/journal/2011/10/twitter-as-lifes-
platf...](http://krisgosser.com/journal/2011/10/twitter-as-lifes-platform/)

This article has similar thoughts: if only Twitter allowed us to combine other
things like our cars, bodies, appliances, and jobs so that communication was
actually useful instead of simply social.

------
zethraeus
Do you have many concrete thoughts on what the API-Twitter could have looked
like now (if not dead, that is)? Tons of clients alone doesn't make an
ecosystem.

Up until the 'stop making clients' announcement I'd always vaguely hoped that
Twitter would become the true online identity - but perhaps that's just
Facebook aversion talking.

~~~
demachina
Are you asking how could they have made money or what cool things would they
have done? I dont care about the making money part, the cool things they could
have done being the Internet's message bus:

\- Really good search, and access to the entire message archive, instead of
hiding their archives in order to monetize it \- Better lists/circles with
more granular control over private/public messaging and groups \- Better
conversation ability, for example ability to make a list of users you want to
have discussion with and have an easy way for everyone to follow the threads,
ability to make it read only to the general public, so everyone can read but
spammers can't ruin it, or take it private to everyone on the list. \-
Video/audio chat/hangouts might be on some people's list, I'm not sure it
belongs in the core message service \- Creative ways to make the message
service the definitive breaking news medium. It already is but you kind of
need ways to rein in the bogus news \- Curation & moderation, methods to
elevate interesting messages, though this moderation should be an option and
easily disabled to avoid groupthink \- Karma, though again it should be
optional \- Better support for real-time streams for topical hash tags like
conferences, spam killing being the main issue. Clients can do a lot of this
but spam killing benefits from support from the message service. \- Openly
embracing and facilitating academic research on their firehose, archives and
social networks

This list could go on all night, buts just a few of my favorites.

------
juan_juarez
You mean Twitter was better when they started out, had no way of monetizing
the service & had constant infrastructure problems resulting daily service
outages?

Yeah, I'd really like to make a single entity with a single point of failure a
fundamental piece of the Internet's infrastructure.

------
tlogan
If there were some successful API companies in past, they would probably go an
API route. The problem is that Ad based business is well understood while
selling API and selling real-time information and being a 'real-time
information bus' is something quite new.

------
dm8
Agreed, but how realtime API business would have made money?

------
brianbreslin
often times i think twitter has become myspace circa 2006.

------
mkramlich
I'd pay a few dollars a month or year in order to: (1) never see ads (promoted
tweets, etc.; retweets from channels I follow are ok), and/or (2) premium
features like a more sophisticated Twitter iOS app, etc. I'm always surprised
by any debate on the web around "OMG how can they monetize? Ads are annoying.
Conundrum!" because I thought this was a solved problem in the business domain
a long time ago. Identify things people are willing to pay for, and then sell
that to them. Those things exist. Do it, rinse, repeat.

~~~
michaelt
Many websites have adopted the donate-to-see-no-ads model - Slashdot, Reddit,
OKCupid etc - but as I understand it none of those have exactly thrived on the
donated money.

Has it been more successful than I've heard?

