
Twitter is not public infrastructure - pclark
http://tumblelog.marco.org/72580346
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thinkzig
I couldn't agree with this more. It goes back to the "should Twitter be taking
usernames from people?" discussion we had here a week or so ago. Twitter is
free. You're not paying for it. It doesn't owe you anything. Plan accordingly.

On the flip side, this begs the question "When _is_ Twitter going to start
charging to use the API?" It seems clear that there is some demand for it.

~~~
rw
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question>

It is a logical fallacy to beg the question.

~~~
sayrer
Given the section on colloquial usage,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question#Contempora...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question#Contemporary_usage_and_variations)

I'd say that's rather prescriptive, maybe even SNOOTy.

<http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html>

~~~
Eliezer
That's what I said the first time I got zapped for that, but the one said,
"'Begs the question' is a technical term with a precise meaning and we need to
preserve that precise meaning," and at that point I gave in.

~~~
sayrer
Yeah, I agree that it's still at the point where people will look down on you
for using it in the colloquial manner.

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mdasen
This is something that's been in my head a little while: would there be
interest in Wikipedia-style, not-for-profit, in the public interest services?
We don't see a lot of this in web stuff - probably because internet has seen a
lot of competition and a lot of free stuff. However, maybe there is still
demand.

~~~
rw
Yes - but contemplate trying to get VC for that. Volunteers only, I suspect.

~~~
smhinsey
i can't come up with much in the way of existing not for profit infrastructure
institutions. do these exist in some form i can't think of? the closest i can
come up with is a rural electrical co-op but i'm not sure that's quite the
same thing.

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sh1mmer
Unless you have a business relationship with whoever you rely upon then you
are in trouble. Even then you should be ready to jump ship. Remember when S3
and EC2 went down? If all of those services that rely on it were ready to jump
onto another service they wouldn't have gone down as well.

While it's not always possible to replace parts of your infrastructure you
rely on, it's common sense to have multiple redundancies for stuff. The
problem in the case of Twitter is their offering is users, rather than
computing. That's something you can't replace if they pull the plug.

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okeumeni
Here is an idea for twitter to make money: User pays a small fee for bandwidth
and space the more space (and bandwidth; they will have to figure this out)
you need the more you must pay.

One more thing (It is an idea derived for my actual stealth app), you get your
own space somewhere to store your tweets. Then they will have to store some
sort of repository there for you. Bandwidth and size become your business; you
deal with the third party.

This way Twitter will somehow become more open for hackers to do stuff on
their platform.

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paul7986
Great to see them announce OAuth support - though I'd prefer a Gmail
labs/iPhone app store approach applied to Twitter (Twitter labs).

I really want to customize my Twitter account and if they had Twitter labs I
could customize my account accordingly; add features found in these apps
directly into my Twitter account. Though instead of Twitter developing new
features take iPhone app store approach and approve/integrate developers
programs into Twitter. They could then sell each feature and share revenue
with developers!

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boredguy8
Yeah, because services built on top of another 3rd party product are never
successful...

This makes no sense at all. True, your business will fail if the underlying
service fails, but Microsoft would fail if all hard drive production suddenly
stopped, too. A great many businesses rely on "private 3rd parties". The real
concern is "how reliable are they?"

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raganwald
> Microsoft would fail if all hard drive production suddenly stopped

The likelihood of "all" hard drive (or PC manufacturing) ceasing is a very
different proposition than the likelihood of a single, unprofitable company
taking an action that puts you out of business.

Most business rely on private 3rd parties, but there is a reason that
companies work hard to have multiple sources of supply for critical goods and
services.

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est
twitter is like the Internet's syslog to me. ^_^

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chadmalik
Is there any reason why the whole publish+subscribe Blogs / RSS complex hasn't
settled on a reasonably easy to implement standard similar to SMTP that allows
organizations to run their own microblog server?

Its really disgusting to think of twitter (or any single vendor) "owning" this
kind of function and preventing simple things like allowing text indexing.

~~~
jonasvp
I believe laconi.ca (<http://laconi.ca/trac/>) provides exactly this kind of
functionality. As always, though, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Look at
Jabber and how little it has taken away from the proprietary IM protocols. As
long as everybody and their mother is on Skype/Twitter/etc. there's not a big
incentive to switch.

~~~
chadmalik
Yes but there needs to be a protocol not just a competing server.

It seems like the older internet protocol standards like SMTP work better. At
least some of this generation of protocols seems to have played out in
horrible ways like the IM market where one or at most 4 vendors have walled
gardens and an open standard doesn't win. I guess in the early 70s when SMTP
was designed there weren't a bunch of big corporations looking to "monetize"
every new feature, just some bearded coding gurus in academia who wanted to
build something that worked.

~~~
gsmaverick
There is a protocol. The Open Microblogging Specification. It allows different
servers to interact!

