
Is There an Opening for an Alternative to Twitter? - buckpost
http://blog.sysomos.com/2012/07/09/is-there-an-opening-for-an-alternative-to-twitter/
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chimeracoder
We've had open-source alternatives like <http://identi.ca/> for years; and in
my memory, these have always been faster to implement new features that
Twitter itself has been. Yet Twitter, not identi.ca, caught on in the public.

So the question is really not whether there is an opening for a Twitter
alternative and what features we would want it to have, but rather why the
existing alternatives _with strictly more features_ failed to catch on.

My take is that Twitter had already passed a threshold by the time these
alternatives hit the scene, and their first-mover advantage carried them a
long way in defending themselves against other similar-but-incompatible
platforms.

Put another way, the reason Twitter is singular and email providers are not is
that email providers communicate with each other over a common open protocol,
whereas Twitter communicates only using its (closed) API.

The difficulty would not be in defining an open protocol to doing what Twitter
does, naturally; existing ones could be tweaked slightly to achieve the same
result. (Look at what Shortmail is doing while maintaining 100% backwards-
compatibility with traditional email).

The problem is that Twitter has no incentive to turn its "open" (read: closed)
API into an completely open means of communication like email, because doing
so would squander the one huge asset it already has: a captive userbase.

(For the record, the same arguments could apply just as well to Facebook;
people just don't think about Facebook that way, because we're all so used to
them being a walled garden).

~~~
smashing
Commercial efforts tends to beat committee efforts in the marketplace.

~~~
shuzchen
Identi.ca isn't exactly a committee effort though. The vast majority of
development comes from Status.net, which makes money (apparently) by
selling/setting up private instances for enterprise usage.

~~~
flatline3
Status.net should fund the development of OSS mobile/desktop clients that work
with multiple Twitter-like services, including Twitter itself.

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SmileyKeith
A twitter replacement could gain traction if they practically duplicated
twitter's api so they could try and convince 3rd party devs(the people who
made twitter) to support this new service in their apps. But really, twitter
has to make money. This is no different from any other service. Even if all
the 'nerds' leave twitter they will still have millions of users and will
continue to be a huge service for 'normal' people. Just like Facebook.

~~~
shuzchen
Probably not. Identi.ca has had a twitter compatible api since as far as I
remember (and I was an early user there), and while a fair number of twitter
clients made the small tweak to enable support for identi.ca, a larger number
of twitter clients did not.

~~~
SmileyKeith
Right but up to this point the "power users" who use Twitter on a daily basis
haven't thought twice about possibly being forced off the platform.

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riffic
What you want exists in OStatus, the successor to OpenMicroBlogging
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus>)

The problem with treating a centralized service provider as a public utility
is you end up ceding control of your namespace to an organization that has a
different motivation than you may.

The solution would be, as an organization, to host your own status update
service on your own domain.

~~~
jmathai
The same concept, applied to photos.
[http://blog.theopenphotoproject.org/post/10537443380/namespa...](http://blog.theopenphotoproject.org/post/10537443380/namespacing-
the-web-for-your-photos)

In reality if you own the domain you can host it yourself or have someone else
host it for you. Your domain makes it portable.

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smallsharptools
I think we really need an alternative to Twitter and it could be a service
which simply runs alongside Twitter. There are many features which would make
Twitter a better service. One area which is a little neglected is simply
having a online identity for the purpose of logging into multiple resources on
the web and from applications. This is done now with Twitter as well as
Facebook but many are concerned about privacy due to the fact that social
networks sustain themselves with advertising. Providing at least an identity
service which carefully handles privacy would be a good start that would get
more people on board.

Then there has to be a way to segment the noise. Discussions about some TV
show or a ballgame can suddenly fill up your Twitter stream. It would help if
these conversations could happen in a category or topic that would allow you
to choose to participate or ignore. Twitter is not really set up to do this
right now.

Twitter also does not aggregate trends very well. Being able to ping a service
with your status such as your location and/or activity could be aggregated and
done so anonymously if you choose. I'd use this sort of service to share what
I am watching or listening to so that the trends can be captured. I would like
to know what music is popular in my area or what movie everyone seems to being
seeing. And I would also open it up to locations with the goal of making
people aware of more of what is going on around them. I'd like to have people
select a persona or demographic they identify with so they can better discover
things which would be more of interest to them. And these interests can go
well beyond music, movies and restaurants. Ideally it would include events in
your community to foster a greater sense of community which Twitter is not
capable of doing.

I hope this does emerge. It seems it is a matter of time but the success of
Twitter, as it is now, is preventing something else from catching on.

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harryh
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines> strikes again!

~~~
petercooper
Betteridge's Law sprung from the cautious coverage of uncertain news and
unconfirmed current events, not genuine speculative questions.

~~~
zbuc
Seriously, it's tiring!

I want a link titled "Is Betteridge's Law Ever Correct?" to wind up on HN some
day.

~~~
sneak
hahahahahahaha +10 internets

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fleitz
There's no room for an alternative to Twitter. Social media on the scale of
Twitter and Facebook is a winner take all market due to network effects.

Is there an opportunity for Twitter to become the next MySpace?

Certainly. However, a Twitter alternative will probably never fly. Instagram
is a great example of how to make Twitter the next MySpace. Find something
that users do all the time on twitter and make it suck less. API revocation is
not something most users know they have a problem with.

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nsxwolf
What's in it for the user? I saw talk about APIs and anger over promoted
tweets. Users don't know what an API is. They know when their favorite app
doesn't integrate with their favorite service, but this hypothetical Twitter
rival has to already be a favorite service.

How do you accomplish that? "Service You Don't Use is now deeply integrated
with all your favorite apps". So what?

And I don't think many users are that outraged about promoted tweets.

You can ship a Twitter alternative after a weekend of coding. Then you can sit
back and listen to the crickets.

I don't see a huge problem with the Twitter idea or its feature set. The big
problem I see is that it's yet another data silo. One of the hottest
communication technologies to come around in years is owned by a single
entity.

Maybe a decentralized competitive technology is a more interesting place to
go. Something that works more how email or the web does. It so far hasn't
worked for Diaspora*, but how about the same concept vs. Twitter?

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asiermarques
What about Jaiku? <http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/>

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suresk
I've kicked around ideas for something similar to, but not exactly like
Twitter. I think there is _possibly_ a market for more controlled, but still
fairly frictionless information sharing similar to Twitter.

For example: A group of us from the same company are going to JavaOne - how do
we do stuff like share snippets about sessions we thought were useful or
broadcast where and when we are going for dinner? Twitter itself isn't great
for that, email lists are cumbersome and tricky to use from mobile - but if
you could quickly create a group of some sort and have everyone join it, it
would be fairly easy.

It could also help avoid spam issues that plague Twitter - a while back, my
previous employer held a small conference and gave out hashtag to use when
tweeting about it. Spammers quickly co-opted the hashtag, which rendered it
useless (this was doubly embarrassing since a lot of the spam was adult-
oriented and my previous employer was a religious organization).

Giving out a group + simple password would have dealt with that situation.

I see a lot of potential uses for something like this, but whether you could
convince enough people to use (and even more, pay for) it, I'm not sure.

~~~
ww520
You hit the nail on the head. That is a real use case for a private Twitter. I
was working on a simple browser-based encryption webapp. Not sure if it helps.
<https://boxuptext.com/tweet>

It let you encrypt a tweet on the browser before sending it to Twitter. Only
followers with the right password can decrypt the tweet.

Instead of recreating the Twitter infrastructure and the social network, it
just adds encryption to create private following.

------
PaulHoule
Two problems:

(i) things like this have a very low ARPU; this makes it hard to write a
business plan that people will take seriously.

(ii) two-sided market. if you want to read tweets, go to twitter. if you want
people to read your tweets, go to twitter.

two-sided markets can be attacked by removing one of the sides; for instance,
a site that lets you read or write tweets while also letting you read or write
into their systems.

Twitter controls the API precisely to prevent that attack.

\---

In general though I think there could be a market for something where people
pay some $ to have a better social media experience or to look "cooler" than
other people. I think anything people spend above $20k for a car, for
instance, is because people want to be seen driving a Lexus or BMW. If people
could turn their cash into visible social media status, you could kick
Facebook to the curb in terms of ARPU.

Premium accounts on LinkedIn are a model, except for the fact that premium
accounts on LinkedIn have practical value -- if a $50 a month subscription
helps a recruiter get one commission for filling a position, that's a great
investment.

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syedasifiqbal
The power of twitter is how frictionless it is to share. You don't have to
sweat over every time who will see it, what your friends will think about it,
and how it will look because by design there is no visual and privacy
decisions. I believe if anything new that comes along it needs to maintain
this aspect and not clutter it with settings and features.

But isn't the real question from consumer's perspective: What is it that
Twitter (or others including Facebook) fail to solve? How can a solution be
defined so it is just as frictionless?

And since Twitter is a platform, richer sharing solutions or parallel
communities (Instagram, Pinterest, Picdish) are being built that just take
advantage of the post to Twitter. In this case the power of Twitter is the
existing community.

In my view, the future are sharing tools and platforms that are 1) simply more
aware of what we are doing and 2) also allow us to be more aware of what
others are doing to enable more meaningful 1-to-1 connections.

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dabent
"It raises the question about whether there is an opportunity for an
alternative to Twitter to emerge, and what it would take for it to establish a
foothold."

I'd say there certainly is an opportunity for an alternative to Twitter or any
established site, just as there was room for Facebook to dethrone MySpace and
Google to dethrone Yahoo! and all the rest.

The much harder part is establishing a foothold. Twitter was founded by an
established player and gained initial users from the core tech people long
before it gained wide acceptance. Facebook had Harvard and college campuses
long before the parents of those students joined Facebook.

What group will adopt the Twitter alternative first?

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jcurbo
So is the best solution for this a federated, open-standards approach ala
XMPP? It seems to me you could even use XMPP as the backbone for an open,
federated short message service.

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temuze
Before anyone mentions G+ and how difficult it is to replace an existing
social network, it's important to consider how lower the barrier of entry is
for Twitter. Leaving FB means leaving your pictures and friendships. That
said, leaving Twitter means leaving your posts and followers. The question is
- is the price of switching platforms low enough?

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juxta
Do you guys feel that if Pownce was never shut down - it would have been a
pretty big competitor/threat to Twitter?

