
How Twitter can save itself from Doom - idiginous
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/30/howTwitterCanSaveItselfFro.html
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gaborcselle
I don't understand how open sourcing or providing a distribution of Twitter
would "save" it. (Or that it needs "saving" in the first place).

What problem does open sourcing Twitter solve?

The strength of Twitter is in the network effects: There's a single place to
go and everyone's on it - your friends and @aplusk. And there's only one
namespace, not a bunch of fragmented ones.

Twitter's already as open as it can be - their API is likely the most-used one
in the world. Open sourcing wouldn't be valuable to them, and they're not
incentivized to do it.

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jerf
The argument, boiled down: Twitter is a walled garden. Open sourcing twitter
would unwall the garden. Failing to unwall the garden will result in Twitter
suffering the fate that every walled garden before it has suffered.
Successfully unwalling it at least gives it a chance.

If you are hip to the ebb and flow of these sorts of things, I think you can
already feel the Twitter-momentum fading, and the same network effects that
make Twitter so potent can turn against it very quickly. Continued success is
not inevitable and failure remains very much an options. Walled gardens always
look inevitable at their peak, but even mighty AOL fell.

In fact, calling AOL mighty probably sounds weird to you. That's what happens
to walled gardens.

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Sukotto
For others (like me until a moment ago) who don't know the name "Matt
Mullenweg" ... He founded WordPress.

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anigbrowl
I thought this was going to be about a minimalist version of ASCII quake.

