

Poor Man's Email? - brlewis
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/04/poorMansEmail.html

======
gry
His speculation on Google 160 character limit is curious. Twitter made it 140
to allow for usernames and the colon prefix. There is a real reason for it,
not a sacred "140 characters is arbitrary and magical" feeling Twitter is
holding on to.

[http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-
born...](http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/)

Since 160 characters is/was the common limit to SMS -- which I think carriers
themselves define, it feels like the author is missing a pretty key element in
Twitter's implementation. The reserved 20 characters _is for_ metadata. I
don't know the SMS protocol at all, but I suspect if Twitter could have
dropped metadata into a header or somesuch, they would have.

~~~
seldo
Yes, the idea that there is any extra room in the SMS protocol for metadata
that Twitter is somehow missing is completely retarded.

(Source: I spent 2 years building SMS-based applications for a mobile content
company. I can format my SMS in binary, and trust me, there's no space in
there.)

~~~
lacker
Most people don't use Twitter over SMS any more.

~~~
DataWhore
I never got that unless you followed about 4 people.

------
davi
_But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is
how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday._ ...

 _I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email._

 _1\. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one._

 _2\. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private._

So why would Schmidt equate them, if they are so different?

This is the interesting question raised by the post. I'm not sure how to
answer it; but my guess is that the answer is unlikely to be found by thinking
about the details of the SMS protocol.

~~~
aston
Here's my best stab at it, from the perspective of a guy who saw the internet
in its infancy (not myself):

Email was the first great asynchronous digital mass communication tool built
on the store-and-forward idea. Twitter (or SMS'd tweets, really) is another,
much more limited form of the same technology.

------
tdavis
Funny, I've been calling it a poor man's IRC from the start. I'll still take
good mailing lists over Twitter any day, though.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
At least a decent mail/news client will track and aggregate all of your unread
messages for easy consumption to keep up with the topics. Explicit threading
in mail/news is just icing on the cake to make conversations so much easier to
stay on top of.

Twitter is the smoke signals of internet communication by comparison.

~~~
tdavis
Twitter also happens to be 95% noise. At least if someone is rambling in a
mailing list, I know they're rambling on-topic. The tweet that made me stop
opening my Twitter client entirely? "Just saw dog poop in the street."

------
physcab
I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as
Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter.

I believe it's almost like a hazing ritual or proving ground. Twitter has
enormous potential to integrate Google's Adsense (or more recently,
FriendSense) or become another distributive voice for their products.

The question though is, does Twitter want to be bought? Is Google too big now
to let Twitter remain truly innovative (I know the catch to this argument is
that Twitter has not been very innovative at all actually)?

I have a feeling some big things will be rolling out the door. The founders
have been smart enough to let the user base define the product, and I
certainly believe that when the time is right, Twitter will be a killer.

Hopefully they don't wait too long though.

~~~
omouse
>I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as
Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter.

They already did this: Jaiku

<http://www.jaiku.com/>

What's the point of trying to buy out Twitter when you've already bought out a
Twitter-clone.

~~~
TweedHeads
Jaiku is a great twitter clone and can be improved much more to dethrone it.

But the first thing they need to do is change that stupid name.

------
Tichy
I am surprised that Windows 7 doesn't have an inbuilt Twitter competitor (or
does it?). With ICQ, lots of companies managed to grab a share, with Twitter
nobody even seems to be trying. Weird.

