
Twitter could be the next Mozilla - pavlov
https://medium.com/swlh/twitter-could-be-the-next-mozilla-e788e3bfd841#.q8lx2go28
======
pavlov
I wrote this Medium post yesterday after the news broke that Salesforce has
walked away from Twitter acquisition talks.

Today I learned that David Levine already had very much the same idea as the
one I presented in my post a couple of weeks ago: [https://medium.com/we-
progress-by-sharing-ideas/bill-gates-s...](https://medium.com/we-progress-by-
sharing-ideas/bill-gates-should-buy-twitter-and-make-it-a-public-
utility-f1ddff93144c#.3ll3l3oyy)

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arkitaip
Yes, let's make this happen! I don't tweet but I use twitter every single day
and it's obvious that it has become fundamental to the net. It's worth
fighting for, worth donating money to.

More on this:

* [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/29/save-t...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/29/save-twitter-buy-platform-shared-ownership)

* #buytwitter: [http://internetofownership.net/2016/10/04/a-guide-to-buytwit...](http://internetofownership.net/2016/10/04/a-guide-to-buytwitter/)

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jrnichols
The way I look at it is this - if Twitter vanished off the internet tomorrow,
I might not really care. I'd see fewer articles using
(foul|racist|sexist|whatever) tweets as their data set.

But Mozilla? I'd miss them. I use both Firefox and Thunderbird for various
things all the time. Mozilla puts out products that I want to use. Twitter
just puts out a lot of noise and angry people.

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jimmywanger
The big difference is the Mozilla was driven into the ground by better
competition, hence validating the market for a better browser.

Twitter has been so far mostly ignored by tech giants, letting it do its own
thing. Nobody else is fighting for that particular market niche.

~~~
Mathnerd314
> Mozilla was driven into the ground by better competition

I thought it was Microsoft's anti-competitive strategy? (bundling IE, changing
the API's to break netscape, etc.)

~~~
tired_man
> > Mozilla was driven into the ground by better competition

> I thought it was Microsoft's anti-competitive strategy? (bundling IE,
> changing the API's to break netscape, etc.)

I thought it was Mozilla's utter lack of regard for the their userbase.

~~~
Mathnerd314
That came later, after they decided that they preferred politics to market
share. (sometime around 2008-09, judging from the TIFF support bug:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160261#c39](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160261#c39))

~~~
tired_man
TIFF. It might have been handy in certain instances, but IMHO, it was never
been a big deal except in the page-layout world. And even then, having an eps
was better.

I missed that cluster of madness for firefox, I guess. Had I known that
Mozilla would turn out this way, I would never have donated money. My name is
on their full-page NYT ad and poster.

I wonder if they'd give me a refund?

