
Why Twitter is a Big Deal (2009) - _pius
http://paulgraham.com/twitter.html
======
r00k
_Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone
like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company._

Makers of Twitter clients were eventually reminded of this fact in a rather
painful way.

~~~
davewiner
It's not just Twitter clients anymore. Basically they're constantly turning
off pieces of the protocol, or so effectively limiting them that they're
turned off.

For example, it's no longer legal to display a tweet unless you use their
rendering.

If you had asked anyone at Twitter in 2009 if they would ever do that, they
would have (probably) said no.

PG was right, then -- it had all the trappings of a new internet protocol, and
therefore was almost a miracle. Except for the catch, which he also noticed --
that a private company could change the deal at any time. And they did.

~~~
danielrakh
Just wondering...why is it wrong for a private company to take control of
their product and user experience? It's their service, why can't they set
certain protocols on how to use it?

~~~
corford
I agree. The problem lies with how people are defining success. If you choose
to define success as a "wild level of user and developer adoption thanks to
the service being free, fun and bankrolled by investors with hundreds of
millions of dollars", then yes, twitter is successful and owes a lot of this
to the open api and ecosystem that grew up around it.

The problem is, this isn't success. Everyone (users, app developers and
twitter itself) has been enjoying a free ride for the last x years, courtesy
of investment money. It's been one big successful party... except for the fact
it's been anything but for the investors. And when it comes to judging a
company's success, the latter is the only kind that matters.

Taken in that light, it's hard to feel sorry for those who were caught out
when the music stopped and the party was over. The investors are free to take
the company in whatever direction they like in pursuit of real success (i.e.
turning a profit) and if that means strangling the third party eco system,
then so be it. Whether or not that's a good idea (I'm not sure it is) is
irrelevant. It's their call to make.

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malay
I was almost positive I had read the idea of Twitter as a protocol before (or
something very similar), even though on Twitter[1] pg notes he never published
this specific piece despite having written it in 2009. I really appreciated
the simplicity of thinking of Twitter that way, and the definition has stuck
with me.

In case anyone else wanted to know where they read it, it's under Request for
Startups, #3[2].

[1] <https://twitter.com/paulg/status/338702876744482816>

[2] <http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html>

~~~
pg
Aha, that must be why I never published it. I turned it into an RFS instead.

~~~
bobz
Paul, curious if your enthusiasm for twitter has waned in light of the
direction they have taken since? Obviously it is still an influential
platform, but the grand vision we all had doesn't seem to be materializing...

~~~
pg
My enthusiasm as a user hasn't waned. I use it increasingly often. But I'm not
so enthusiastic about funding companies based on it. There are probably still
opportunities for companies to grow by using Twitter initially, but it would
be risky to start a company that depended on Twitter.

~~~
davewiner
I still use it too, but I stopped developing new stuff using their APIs a
couple of years ago.

Next month they're probably going to break my last app that uses their API,
and then it's going to create a tough choice for me.

Do I post stuff there manually, or do I just stop pushing links through
Twitter.

------
Aqueous
I wouldn't really call it a protocol. If Twitter is a protocol, then every
exposed JSON-emitting API is a protocol - and perhaps that's true. But Twitter
isn't unique in that respect. People have been publishing messages without
specified recipients for a long time - it's called broadcasting, or
publishing, or web publishing.

I wouldn't say the recipients are totally unspecified, either.

What makes Twitter unique is the artificial limit imposed on messages that can
be broadcasted indiscriminately. And that makes it more of a new form of
communication than any kind of protocol. It leads to a new form of expression,
and a new way of getting a fairly accurate global view of the attitudes and
cultural tides that are flowing through humanity in real time. That does make
it truly earth shaking.

------
bsaul
Because publishing a web page on any blog site lets you specify the recipients
? To be a "protocol" imply a sort of "standard" shared , improved and used by
different "actors" ( that's the reason for a protocol : two different people
aggreing on a way to communicate). Twitter has always been centralized and
closed in that sense.

~~~
davewiner
Tweets do have recipients, which makes them different from a web page.

At the next level up from the one you describe it is very much a protocol.

Users get to decide whose tweets they follow and don't. And senders can block
receivers if they want to. Twitter may have a very small something to say
about that (spam, community standards) but for the most that's a free choice
on the part of both the sender and the receiver.

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Tycho
Yes, I thought this also. It's a protocol like email or IRC, except it's
privately owned. _And_ it's actually suited to being monopolised by a single
company.

I also wondered if you could characterise something like Facebook the same
way. If you strip away all the extra functions, you have a protocol for
setting up a private network of friends, identified by their real names, who
can then broadcast to each other. Other social networks didn't have quite the
same setup - not private by default, not real names.

------
DigitalSea
_But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer._

They had an opportunity to be a free and open platform that spurns innovation
instead they stifle it and impose ridiculous restrictions upon those who can
only make the service better. In the beginning Twitter was a great platform to
build on, but no doubt due to growing pressure to make money, Twitter have
driven away a large number of developers, maybe Twitter will be fine without
them but for how long?

~~~
glomph
spurs?

------
li-ch
Just out of curiosity, is there an open source twitter-like protocol?

~~~
steveklabnik
There is OStatus, supported by rstatus, diaspora, and status.net.

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mrwnmonm
does this definition applied to tumblr too?

~~~
mehrzad
Since Tumblr has supported multimedia content for a while, I'd say no. Twitter
was (and is still mostly) text only. Protocols don't have to be text-only, but
that's what makes Twitter feel like one, I guess? Just my two cents.

~~~
lmm
To my mind the fact that including pictures or video is less ad-hoc with
Tumblr makes it more of a protocol, not less. Honestly Twitter doesn't feel
particularly special to me - Facebook, Google+, even Livejournal feel like
they're the same "kind of thing". Heck, at times Youtube behaves the same way.
But I never got hugely into twitter, maybe it's different if you're a real
fan.

~~~
mehrzad
>To my mind the fact that including pictures or video is less ad-hoc with
Tumblr makes it more of a protocol,

I see what you mean, it's like Twitter but customizable to the core - true to
any good protocol. What made twitter really a protocol was that so many
clients were made for its liberal API.

------
dmazin
It is intellectually weak to post a predictive piece that you wrote in 2009
after it's come true.

~~~
Shog9
Just think how much more enjoyable it would be if futurists kept their
analyses and predictions to themselves until there was some actual evidence to
support them though.

I predict that as a group they'd be much more respected.

Of course, we'd have to come up with a new name for them. "Histori...sts"

~~~
eksith
Or "Ex-Post-Revelationists"?

