
Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field. - alexfarran
http://www.slate.com/id/2225283/pagenum/all/
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muckster
Well then let them follow the trajectory that SMS has - since in many ways
twitter is just SMS over HTTP. Let twitter be coerced into interoperability
like the telcos have ( <http://bit.ly/jft6w> ). Surely the necessary technical
bits could be plucked from XMPP.

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pistoriusp
I've always considered twitter to be nothing more than an indexed comment.

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dlsspy
twitter is an SMS mailing list provider. Anyone can do this, but they quickly
find that it costs lots and lots of money.

For whatever reason, twitter has been given lots and lots of money to provide
this service. It's otherwise impossible to compete with "provide a very
expensive service for free"

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vannevar
Twitter can also be seen as a special case of email where:

\- every account is also a mailing list

\- messages have no body, only a subject line

\- all the messages flow through a single company's servers

It would be technically trivial for a major email provider (say, Google) to
create a Twitter clone.

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dlsspy
Well, google has jaiku as well as gmail, of course. And there's plurk, and
identi.ca, and several others.

identi.ca is promising as it's federated and all that, but when you go there,
you see the same thing over and over again: "How do I use this with SMS?" I
don't think users understand the enormous cost twitter is just eating for no
apparent reason.

And that's the main thing twitter has that is hard to reproduce: SMS in and
out at scale. It's not that that's a hard technical problem, it's just
incredibly expensive to do that.

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swombat
_It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as
it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point
of failure._

For a given, plucked-from-thin-air definition of "hard", no, it's not hard.

In the real world, yes, it's hard.

I don't see why the fact that people rely on Twitter should mean that they
need to be broken up or opened up or any such thing.

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jrockway
identi.ca.

~~~
wmf
Actually, Laconica.

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onreact-com
We clearly need a open microblogging standard where Twitter updates would not
be controlled solely by Twitter itself.

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vannevar
We have one. It's extremely scalable and stable. It's well-tested, having been
in use for 40 years, with a user base that has grown to around a billion
worldwide. It's called email. See my comment above...

