Perhaps you think that the API-centric model would have never worked, and that if the ad guys wouldn’t have won, Twitter would not be alive today. Maybe.
I think this deserves a bit more attention. It's easy to point fingers and make all kinds of what-if predictions, but just handwaving money aside in favor of a poorly defined API utopia ignores the reality of running a business.
Agreed. It would be a much more compelling argument if there were examples of successful API companies presented as possible models for Twitter as an API company. (In addition to the example of Google as an advertising company.)
A "firehose" API for the net would be awesome, but it probably needs to be Open Source, in order to avoid being driven towards monetization. Of course, without the drive to make money, Twitter may have never taken off quite the way it did, and may have never had the money to spend on SMS and other expenses they were dealing with in the beginning to create that firehose of data.
The Open Source twitter clones (like identi.ca) have modeled what Twitter became, mostly, rather than what Twitter could have been...so, as far as I know, there isn't much out there that answers this description. I'd started working on something I was calling SYSRSS years ago, which was to be a realtime systems human and machine readable data stream protocol and implementation, but never got a minimum viable product out the door, as I could never quite figure out the right niche for such a thing. I think it may have been too specific, though building on top of an existing popular data format and protocol was probably a valid choice.
In short, I agree that Twitter could have been more awesome than what it is. But, I don't know if I could have made it better, or that having the API guys win would have succeeded. I haven't done any research into that field lately...I wonder if there are any new developments in the Open Source world for this kind of thing?
You should check out Simperium (disclaimer: I'm the co-founder and Twitter's former platform lead is one of our advisors/investors). While it's not immediately apparent yet, we're pushing in this direction: it's easy to create a firehose for your app, and we're working on ways for apps to easily interconnect with each other in a less file-centric, more API-centric way.
The niche we chose to start with is device syncing, based on our experience building Simplenote (which is to Evernote as Twitter is to Facebook). We know there's a need for something more flexible and powerful than iCloud in this regard, so that's what we focused on initially. But we believe a good solution for moving data between devices is also a good solution for moving data between people and 3rd-party apps.
Simplenote's 3rd-party ecosystem looks similar to Twitter's in the earlier days. We're taking the path they didn't take. Rather than shoring up Simplenote vertically, we're focused on extending our backend data layer horizontally and generalizing it for a variety of apps and services (though specifically not as an all-encompassing "backend-as-a-service"). We'll be announcing our open source strategy soon. This is all really hard though, both technically and as a business.
Telehash is the Open Source "firehose API" you seek. The proposal describes a DHT that routes JSON. However, it seems like I've been waiting for it for years. Maybe it's the obscure telephone lingo that the API is described in terms of that's discouraging would-be implementers, but it's nothing that a good old facade can't fix.
One of the most ambitious projects I've seen in this vein is psyced ( http://www.psyced.org/ ) which starts from a redesign of IRC and has gone on to accumulate a kitchen-sink's worth of protocol compatibility(from the front page: Jabber™/XMPP S2S, IRC, TELNET, HTTP, SMTP, OAuth, XML, RSS; limited/experimental code for XMPP C2S, Java Applets, Status.Net, Twitter API, WAP, NNTP.) The core protocol is a gorgeous "Right Thing" design which has had many years to mature, and attempts to cover all venues: IM, chat room, microblogging, mail, profiles...
However, like with all of these open-source efforts, traction as a network seems to be missing.
"One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API."
I think the real problem with this is that Twitter made an even more fundamental mistake early on, which is that they only support text and not data/microformats. That is, there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework in such a way that it automatically gets added to students' dayplanners, no way to list something for sale in a globally searchable way, no way to tweet out a dating profile, etc.
Twitter really should have been the company that enabled the semantic web and became the de facto platform powering the entire thing.
I'm of the school that one of the worst things Twitter could do is add support for data/attachments, long messages or message bloat in general. The essence of Twitter and its beauty is the messages are short, low overhead and you can skim them very quickly. It compels people to be brief and to not ramble and that is its value and its a good fit for capacity limited mobile. Animated GIF's in Google+ are mostly just annoying.
If you need heavy data then you put a link in the mesage and once people establish they are interested in the subject, then they can go to some server to get the heavy content and all the heavy content isn't centralized at the message service provider.
Also storing and transmitting pictures, video and audio on the message bus dramatically increases overhead, cost and risks of running the service. The second you support it you will have people using it to violate copyrights and laws, you land in a quagmire of shifting standard on what is indecent or illegal in every country in the world. You end up needing a big staff just to deal with take down requests, subpoena requests and to sift though your fire hose to try to eliminate stuff that is going to offend people.
The beauty of short messages is they have very limited capacity to violate laws and copyrights and the message service provider shouldn't be responsile for what is on the web sites the messages link to.
Having integrated image, audio and video support is nice but its actually better if its hosted away from the message bus and decentralized like Twitpic was.
Seems to me that this isn't a fundamental mistake but a featureset they could still add now. Not that it's on the table at Twitter HQ, but I believe that the window of opportunity to give Twitter the ability to read and provide microformats is still here. Existing clients would get the same tweets, but could be easily extended to link to the web to get the "attached" data.
Your idea makes me swoon, but I think it'll never happen because that isn't the vision Twitter has, not because it's too late.
When Twitter introduced annotations, I thought that was the beginning: soon, we would have Twitter classifieds, Twitter marketplace, Twitter as a data firehose for anything... All I was waiting for is annotations in the Search API. I'm positive that's all that was needed to provide the initial infrastructure for semantics -- the community would take care of the rest. Unfortunatelly, not only has it never happened, but Twitter took an entirely different course.
I can understand them, though. They had to start making money fast and took a less risky road. But I can't help thinking: bugger, this could've been so much more than celebrities and hashtags.
The problem there is yet another crappy "what's hot" or "what's trending" or "what's popular" block. Google can't solve it for news, Netflix can't solve it for movies, Amazon can't solve it for related products, and a half-borked, underfunded API for accessing the Twitter firehose is unlikely to create an ecosystem for startups that magically condense the entire world's real-time chit-chat into something I find compelling.
Yet isn't that block fundamentally the (false) promise of Twitter? We'll let you, Mr. Brandybrand [perhaps an individual], target your products and ideas and political manifestos that change the world and the blog posts and cat pictures and defamatory attacks and racist sentiments that don't -- somehow to people who'll find it interesting?
The World's Fairs promised us flying cars; Hollywood promised us a flying skateboard. Both still live on in our dreams, so I have a tough time thinking "marketing" killed 'em.
Especially given Twitter's very public technology missteps. Hash exclamation point, ya digg? Half a billion later and the site still loads correctly about as often as Gawker does. He's bitching that an API can't party on their data? Hell, I can't even retrieve my own direct messages from a year ago on the site itself.
Meanwhile: somebody just replied in email with "HAHAHAHA!" Gmail inserted a widget offering to translate it from Filipino and shows an ad for Coconuts beside it. Coconuts! Meanwhile my last Twitter notification is in the Spam folder.
Trends on Twitter just aren't important enough for everyone to constantly cite as to why Twitter sucks or why our species is doomed. Its just a source of brief entertainment to see what large numbers of people you probably don't have much in common with are obsessing over at the moment.
Effective Twitter usage is to follow large numbers of interesting people and news sources and then look at the trending topics among the people you care about, you have things in common with and whose opinions you value. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't do trends for just your stream which is one of the many reasons third party clients can rock and Twitter, the company, tends to not rock.
Nah. The internet was built to be decentralized with no single point of failure. Twitter and facebook and other centralized services are not the future. Cloud and tiers are fine as commodities, but having ONE company manage ALL the infrastructure for a particular type of communication is not the "internet way". The futurist in you shouldnt be upset.
Imagine if all email went through a single company's servers, and "fail whale" meant you had to WAIT until Email.com was back up until you sent that file to the coworker across the hall from you...
What we need is a protocol and a decentralized, open source reference implementation.
A bit off topic, you totally psychologically hijacked me for a kudo. :-P
I was curious what the kudos were, so I hovered over the icon. It told me not to move and started filling up, so I waited curiously. Finally, it counted that as a kudo from me to you!
That said, you have a good point. They really have taken a different road recently with their crackdown on the API. They've got every right do do so, and they're making money doing it (always important for a company), but it would've been really interesting to see the equivalent of an API-based SMS-style nearly-ubiquitous service.
That happened to me too the first time I saw a link to this blog on HN. But now I'm wiser. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me, can't get fooled again.
This feels like an opportunity. I'd love to hear a broader description of the sorts of functionality that twitter could have become as a messaging API instead of an ad driven business.
Anybody have any thoughts to share?
I wonder if twitter's early and longlasting scaling problems affected their choice at all.
I know that when iOS 5.0 mentioned 'twitter integration' and BBM like messaging, I had assumed (wrongly) that iOS was going to use twitter DMs in the way that they are using iMessages now. This would be using a person's twitter handle instead of the Apple ID associated with the iPhone. Like I said, this did not come to pass, but it could have been used as a BBM-like messaging service pre-iMessaging.
So I'll step up and blow my team's trumpet. It's the end of a long weekend hackathon on buddycloud. It's also great to see the rumblings of what could be next.
What if there existed a Twitter-like technological entity, split into two parts, which together formed a virtual democratic republic.
1. The "community", comprised of those persons and corporations reading and writing messages ("tweets"), un/following each other, forming groups, etc. Both individuals and corporate entities could/would pay for the RESTful server infrastructure powering the basic messaging service.
2.The elected "governance body" which is in charge of:
* A massive geo-weighted DNS round-robin, so the service can operate under a single domain name.
* A system of caches, e.g. a bunch of varnish instances spread across datacenters around the world.
* A lightweight, tiered push-notification system which is orthogonal to the RESTful service, and allows clients to request that they be notified when, say, a timeline-resource has been updated; and also allows the server endpoints to originate notifications of updates.
* Authoring and updating the specifications for protocol support, message format, message signing, media type definitions and semantic profiles, and data replication between servers.
* The "laws" which govern the process of joining the community (e.g. agreeing to messages being under some creative commons license); having a server/s added to the round robin; kicking a server/s out of the round robin for some violation of the specs and laws (e.g. message tampering); banning a user-entity for spamming; and so on.
At regular intervals, the worldwide community would elect members of the governance body. Over time, the specs and laws of the service would evolve -- as a result of the elections, popular demand and technical problems and innovations.
In the beginning, the governance body, specs and laws would be established by the founding participants, to avoid a chicken-and-egg scenario.
---
Here's why I see this attracting interest of corporations and thus motivating them to pay for the servers and develop/deploy implementations of the technical specs:
All sorts of companies would love to analyze the firehose of public messages being pumped through Twitter (or this hypothetical service). They would also like to data-mine the timeline histories. Twitter is more and more making that a difficult and costly proposition. By participating in the infrastructure, companies and individuals would automatically have their own views of the firehose, and could choose whether to invest in the tech to keep the historical data beyond some minimum amount mandated by the specs.
In turn, such infrastructure participants could resell access to their views of the firehose and/or historical data to those who can't or don't want to run servers but are interested in exploring the data. Thus a market would be created, and there would be a healthy amount of competition among infrastructure participants regarding the prices of firehose/history access and the APIs they make available for tapping into those paid resources.
I think that's called HTTP. Then all you need is a place to search the content, where hosting that is easier than hosting all the data. And that's called google.
Pie-in-the-sky companies have to make money eventually.
Either you start making money, or you'll have to do it later and that may disappoint some people.
For a year or two I've predicted the ultimate demise of Twitter, which probably means some kind of acquisition. I stand by that prediction. They have hundreds of millions (if not billions) so it's not going to happen overnight but it will happen.
What is Twitter? I see it as two things:
1. Infrastructure: it is a means of sending thousands of short messages a second to people in asymmetric relationships. Technically this isn't a hard problem. There are many companies around who handle traffic many orders of magnitude above this. The danger with infrastructure is that it will get commoditized. The cost in terms of resources (bandwidth, CPU, power) is not that high;
There are parallels between Twitter and SMS. SMS survives and is hugely profitable because of the telco cartel that monopolizes it. Where hosting companies will provide you with bandwidth for cents per GB, SMS costs thousands if not millions of dollars per GB. That too will come to an end eventually. What saves it now is all the players want to push their own standards and they aren't interoperable. It's IM fiefdoms all over again.
2. An audience. Twitter and its users have the ability to reach a large number of people. Originally Twitter was envisioned as a means of real-time status updates between normal people. My impression is that this use case is basically dead. The vast majority of Twitter usage seems to be as a communication tool by celebrities. There is a business in that but it isn't the revolutionary communication tool it was once thought (and some still think) it to be.
So the camps in question (the API camp and the ad camp) fit into the above.
Owning infrastructure can be hugely lucrative (eg SMS). History is full of examples of this. Railroads, oil, telephony, etc. The problem is that you get too big and the government will intervene.
Messaging infrastructure is too important for one party to own it. Email is federated and open. The future of messaging is too (I believe) federated and open.
So that leaves (2), the ad camp. The problem with advertising on Twitter is the same as it is on Facebook: it's an unwelcome intrusion.
Perhaps Twitter could have (and may still be able to) build a display ad business but Twitter is still not a particularly mainstream product (and IMHO it doesn't look like it ever will be).
Perhaps Twitter could've had a subreddit/Facebook pages type hubrid model. Upvoting of Tweets is possibly interesting.
Of course this faces the same problem Digg had: few things are globally interesting. What's interesting to you is not necessarily interesting to me so you changing what I see is again an intrusion.
Basically "content gateways" (like Digg, Slashdot, etc) were I believe transitional. I don't believe you'll have a repeat of Digg moderators being paid to promote stories. You can (and people do) pay celebrities to retweet things but that still only goes to their followers. They have to consider their brands and building and keeping their respective audiences too.
Those thinking Twitter should have an open firehose (or close to it) are neglecting the reality that Twitter is a business and needs to make money somehow. Open access to their content greatly diminishes that.
Lastly, quite a few people will speak of "betrayed" by Twitter over API access. They also believe that developers were largely responsible for making Twitter popular. As I said (just yesterday) that this is inevitable. Become too successful and the platform subsumes you into their core offering (no one wants core features controlled by third parties). Developers were I believe largely incidental to Twitter's success. Twitter succeeded (as it were) because people used it. To take credit for that as a developer community is like saying that the automobile succeeded because of car wash stations and autoshops selling rims.
EDIT: one last point. It's popular, particularly on HN, to simply build an audience or something that scales without concern for monetization. I certainly understand the logic behind this. Sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't.
Twitter hasn't come up with a scalable business model yet because there isn't one. As much as founders can be praised for "swinging for the fences" and going all in, sometimes the best outcome is to be acquired because what you've developed isn't a viable independent business but could be an incredibly valuable part of a wider portfolio of products.
Look at all those people talking about the eurocup!
Also:
> The problem with advertising on Twitter is the same as it is on Facebook: it's an unwelcome intrusion.
You mean, like television commercials? Which are the foundation of an I don't even know how many billion dollar industry. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk they'll get this right but there's a lot of evidence out their in the world that eyeballs can be turned into money just about anywhere. It seems a bit hasty to just dismiss all of that.
There's also plenty of buying intent to work with like this:
Armchair economists like to discuss SMS as an example of oligopolies gone bad, but that doesn't pass the smell test. Telephone competition is suboptimal but SMS is uniquely bad in its outcomes; they've done a much better job on all other forms of data. Furthermore, costs vary from place to place but by all accounts SMS is still very expensive worldwide.
Well, it happens that SMS is a technical hack; the data payloads are snuck into the control channel. The bandwidth in this channel is very scarce. The message could be re-routed over the data network, but the cross-carrier costs are still expensive because the receiving phone might have to use the old implemnetation.
> The vast majority of Twitter usage seems to be as a communication tool by celebrities.
I had a hard time with the credibility of this analysis after that whopper. Twitter use continues to grow exponentially and is currently at 140 million active users with 340 million tweets per day. It is the third largest social network behind Facebook and LinkedIn.
To make money, you either need to help others make money, or help people get laid.
Advertising is a possibility but it would ultimately be a failure given the investment that has gone towards Twitter.
Paying for a premium Twitter account isn't going help either. For most people, Twitter doesn't help them make money or isn't a status symbol.
So perhaps the business model needs to be to help people get laid somehow. Listen, people want to either get rich or get laid - do 1 or the other and you'll make a lot of money.
I don't think the reaction would be nearly as bad if Twitter was better at making clients for their own service. They aren't very good at it. Twitter for Mac (née Tweetie) is dying on the vine.
TweetBot is 10x better on iOS than the native client, and Osfoora on the desktop.
Why not meet the challenge of an ecosystem in conjunction with ad revenue rather than just blanket rule against it?
Ditto on Android. Plume is so much better than the official client. This kind of things make you wonder about missed opportunities for Google+, where you can't have a proper alternative client…
> One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. ... The other camp looked at Google’s advertising model for inspiration, and decided that building their own version of AdWords would be the right way to go.
There was a 3rd camp, those who wanted Twitter to become a protocol instead of a silo. From the sounds of it this camp must have been especially small. It's a shame, it was the only way to make it viable long-term.
What a bizarre post. A company could have entered a different market and killed it 5 years ago... however that market has still yet to materialize, whereas the market that the company actually entered was rather lucrative. Also, Steve Jobs could have invented a company to build hover cars and that company could have changed the world.
Would be cool to see a startup creating a "Twitter for computers" service. An highly reliable system that can be used just to route messages via an API, with a semantic similar to the one of twitter, to be used as a building component for everything you need. Not sure about what a business model would look like.
Great post. It seems like there are several different interpretations of what an API-centric business model would have looked like: the "all the data in one place" model, and the "communications bus for the internet" model. (These are not mutually exclusive, necessarily.)
I always loved the idea of Twitter as a communications bus for the internet. It probably would have been very challenging to monetize (though "we have all the data" as a thing to sell isn't bad, it works well for google in a search/1.0 context because they also have all the intent and all the UI around it).
It makes me wonder how much this set of decisions was driven by the amount of capital they raised and the need to demonstrate monetization.
It seems like deciding the business would be ad-supported was the first step toward becoming MySpace2.0.
It seems to me that the potential success of the realtime API approach would be reliant on impressive, profitable applications. Although I can think of a few, I can't think of enough of them to argue against the AdWords approach, which apparently drives revenue for now. If Twitter had chosen the API direction initially it would have been partially on them to cultivate the developer community required to make their strategy works — which could be seen as orthogonal to developing a great product and solving infrastructure problems.
In the long run these two approaches may not actually be at odds with one another. AdWords-ish works for now, and as new apps are developed there may be an opportunity to move back in that direction.
Not to mention their photo product (their partership with photobucket or whatever) is pretty bad... Even the two links in this article that point to twitter photos come up 404 on mobile... wtf. The third party tweet photo sites are still better.
The engineers/product developers lost and the marketing won. It happens many times because developers are busy building value while marketing/business is scheming/planning/making deals. When this changes we will have more truly awesome products I believe, when Japan was seriously winning they were engineer and product focused but have business/marketing bloat destroying these products nowadays. Making needs as much focus as marketing.
The "marketing screws companies up" meme is old and tired. Yes, bad marketing sucks. So does bad engineering. The reality of creating a business is you need to market it. It's one company in a thousand that can survive with no marketing, and that happens purely by luck.
Marketing is actually really hard. The internet has also drastically altered how marketing happens, since the conversation now needs to be two-way (not just blasting out advertisements). The companies who do this the best don't get credit for great marketing because it just appear natural.
What is worse about this meme is it becomes poisonous inside companies. Instead of everybody working together to build the company, you can have people trying to satisfy agendas. Engineers focus on technology instead of products; marketing tells lies in an effort to force engineering down the path they want.
The only thing about this meme that has any value is that, at its core, the meme talks about providing real value instead of talking about value. But it is the height of arrogance to believe only engineers can create something of value.
This article has similar thoughts: if only Twitter allowed us to combine other things like our cars, bodies, appliances, and jobs so that communication was actually useful instead of simply social.
[+] [-] MicahWedemeyer|13 years ago|reply
I think this deserves a bit more attention. It's easy to point fingers and make all kinds of what-if predictions, but just handwaving money aside in favor of a poorly defined API utopia ignores the reality of running a business.
[+] [-] runako|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|13 years ago|reply
The Open Source twitter clones (like identi.ca) have modeled what Twitter became, mostly, rather than what Twitter could have been...so, as far as I know, there isn't much out there that answers this description. I'd started working on something I was calling SYSRSS years ago, which was to be a realtime systems human and machine readable data stream protocol and implementation, but never got a minimum viable product out the door, as I could never quite figure out the right niche for such a thing. I think it may have been too specific, though building on top of an existing popular data format and protocol was probably a valid choice.
In short, I agree that Twitter could have been more awesome than what it is. But, I don't know if I could have made it better, or that having the API guys win would have succeeded. I haven't done any research into that field lately...I wonder if there are any new developments in the Open Source world for this kind of thing?
[+] [-] cloudmike|13 years ago|reply
The niche we chose to start with is device syncing, based on our experience building Simplenote (which is to Evernote as Twitter is to Facebook). We know there's a need for something more flexible and powerful than iCloud in this regard, so that's what we focused on initially. But we believe a good solution for moving data between devices is also a good solution for moving data between people and 3rd-party apps.
Simplenote's 3rd-party ecosystem looks similar to Twitter's in the earlier days. We're taking the path they didn't take. Rather than shoring up Simplenote vertically, we're focused on extending our backend data layer horizontally and generalizing it for a variety of apps and services (though specifically not as an all-encompassing "backend-as-a-service"). We'll be announcing our open source strategy soon. This is all really hard though, both technically and as a business.
[+] [-] politician|13 years ago|reply
http://telehash.org/
[+] [-] chipsy|13 years ago|reply
However, like with all of these open-source efforts, traction as a network seems to be missing.
[+] [-] Alex3917|13 years ago|reply
I think the real problem with this is that Twitter made an even more fundamental mistake early on, which is that they only support text and not data/microformats. That is, there is no way for a professor to tweet out the homework in such a way that it automatically gets added to students' dayplanners, no way to list something for sale in a globally searchable way, no way to tweet out a dating profile, etc.
Twitter really should have been the company that enabled the semantic web and became the de facto platform powering the entire thing.
[+] [-] demachina|13 years ago|reply
If you need heavy data then you put a link in the mesage and once people establish they are interested in the subject, then they can go to some server to get the heavy content and all the heavy content isn't centralized at the message service provider.
Also storing and transmitting pictures, video and audio on the message bus dramatically increases overhead, cost and risks of running the service. The second you support it you will have people using it to violate copyrights and laws, you land in a quagmire of shifting standard on what is indecent or illegal in every country in the world. You end up needing a big staff just to deal with take down requests, subpoena requests and to sift though your fire hose to try to eliminate stuff that is going to offend people.
The beauty of short messages is they have very limited capacity to violate laws and copyrights and the message service provider shouldn't be responsile for what is on the web sites the messages link to.
Having integrated image, audio and video support is nice but its actually better if its hosted away from the message bus and decentralized like Twitpic was.
[+] [-] conesus|13 years ago|reply
Your idea makes me swoon, but I think it'll never happen because that isn't the vision Twitter has, not because it's too late.
[+] [-] rodp|13 years ago|reply
When Twitter introduced annotations, I thought that was the beginning: soon, we would have Twitter classifieds, Twitter marketplace, Twitter as a data firehose for anything... All I was waiting for is annotations in the Search API. I'm positive that's all that was needed to provide the initial infrastructure for semantics -- the community would take care of the rest. Unfortunatelly, not only has it never happened, but Twitter took an entirely different course.
I can understand them, though. They had to start making money fast and took a less risky road. But I can't help thinking: bugger, this could've been so much more than celebrities and hashtags.
[+] [-] damian2000|13 years ago|reply
Surely a link to a URL is all you need to do most of that stuff?
[+] [-] meanguy|13 years ago|reply
The problem there is yet another crappy "what's hot" or "what's trending" or "what's popular" block. Google can't solve it for news, Netflix can't solve it for movies, Amazon can't solve it for related products, and a half-borked, underfunded API for accessing the Twitter firehose is unlikely to create an ecosystem for startups that magically condense the entire world's real-time chit-chat into something I find compelling.
Yet isn't that block fundamentally the (false) promise of Twitter? We'll let you, Mr. Brandybrand [perhaps an individual], target your products and ideas and political manifestos that change the world and the blog posts and cat pictures and defamatory attacks and racist sentiments that don't -- somehow to people who'll find it interesting?
The World's Fairs promised us flying cars; Hollywood promised us a flying skateboard. Both still live on in our dreams, so I have a tough time thinking "marketing" killed 'em.
Especially given Twitter's very public technology missteps. Hash exclamation point, ya digg? Half a billion later and the site still loads correctly about as often as Gawker does. He's bitching that an API can't party on their data? Hell, I can't even retrieve my own direct messages from a year ago on the site itself.
Meanwhile: somebody just replied in email with "HAHAHAHA!" Gmail inserted a widget offering to translate it from Filipino and shows an ad for Coconuts beside it. Coconuts! Meanwhile my last Twitter notification is in the Spam folder.
Nope, this isn't "the marketing guys."
[+] [-] demachina|13 years ago|reply
Effective Twitter usage is to follow large numbers of interesting people and news sources and then look at the trending topics among the people you care about, you have things in common with and whose opinions you value. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't do trends for just your stream which is one of the many reasons third party clients can rock and Twitter, the company, tends to not rock.
[+] [-] EGreg|13 years ago|reply
Imagine if all email went through a single company's servers, and "fail whale" meant you had to WAIT until Email.com was back up until you sent that file to the coworker across the hall from you...
What we need is a protocol and a decentralized, open source reference implementation.
[+] [-] Kerrick|13 years ago|reply
I was curious what the kudos were, so I hovered over the icon. It told me not to move and started filling up, so I waited curiously. Finally, it counted that as a kudo from me to you!
That said, you have a good point. They really have taken a different road recently with their crackdown on the API. They've got every right do do so, and they're making money doing it (always important for a company), but it would've been really interesting to see the equivalent of an API-based SMS-style nearly-ubiquitous service.
[+] [-] Rudism|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|13 years ago|reply
Anybody have any thoughts to share?
I wonder if twitter's early and longlasting scaling problems affected their choice at all.
[+] [-] tmarthal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|13 years ago|reply
What we need is a decentralized protocol that does what the "API Twitter" could have done.
[+] [-] imaginator|13 years ago|reply
Where we stand: The server and webclient are mostly done. We're now working on distributed media storage and a distributed API (https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Buddycloud_HTTP_API)
For an example of buddycloud in action here's our hackathon channel from today: https://beta.buddycloud.org/[email protected]
[+] [-] michaelsbradley|13 years ago|reply
1. The "community", comprised of those persons and corporations reading and writing messages ("tweets"), un/following each other, forming groups, etc. Both individuals and corporate entities could/would pay for the RESTful server infrastructure powering the basic messaging service.
2.The elected "governance body" which is in charge of:
* A massive geo-weighted DNS round-robin, so the service can operate under a single domain name.
* A system of caches, e.g. a bunch of varnish instances spread across datacenters around the world.
* A lightweight, tiered push-notification system which is orthogonal to the RESTful service, and allows clients to request that they be notified when, say, a timeline-resource has been updated; and also allows the server endpoints to originate notifications of updates.
* Authoring and updating the specifications for protocol support, message format, message signing, media type definitions and semantic profiles, and data replication between servers.
* The "laws" which govern the process of joining the community (e.g. agreeing to messages being under some creative commons license); having a server/s added to the round robin; kicking a server/s out of the round robin for some violation of the specs and laws (e.g. message tampering); banning a user-entity for spamming; and so on.
At regular intervals, the worldwide community would elect members of the governance body. Over time, the specs and laws of the service would evolve -- as a result of the elections, popular demand and technical problems and innovations.
In the beginning, the governance body, specs and laws would be established by the founding participants, to avoid a chicken-and-egg scenario.
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Here's why I see this attracting interest of corporations and thus motivating them to pay for the servers and develop/deploy implementations of the technical specs:
All sorts of companies would love to analyze the firehose of public messages being pumped through Twitter (or this hypothetical service). They would also like to data-mine the timeline histories. Twitter is more and more making that a difficult and costly proposition. By participating in the infrastructure, companies and individuals would automatically have their own views of the firehose, and could choose whether to invest in the tech to keep the historical data beyond some minimum amount mandated by the specs.
In turn, such infrastructure participants could resell access to their views of the firehose and/or historical data to those who can't or don't want to run servers but are interested in exploring the data. Thus a market would be created, and there would be a healthy amount of competition among infrastructure participants regarding the prices of firehose/history access and the APIs they make available for tapping into those paid resources.
[+] [-] alttab|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] demachina|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EternalFury|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EternalFury|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
What is Twitter? I see it as two things:
1. Infrastructure: it is a means of sending thousands of short messages a second to people in asymmetric relationships. Technically this isn't a hard problem. There are many companies around who handle traffic many orders of magnitude above this. The danger with infrastructure is that it will get commoditized. The cost in terms of resources (bandwidth, CPU, power) is not that high;
There are parallels between Twitter and SMS. SMS survives and is hugely profitable because of the telco cartel that monopolizes it. Where hosting companies will provide you with bandwidth for cents per GB, SMS costs thousands if not millions of dollars per GB. That too will come to an end eventually. What saves it now is all the players want to push their own standards and they aren't interoperable. It's IM fiefdoms all over again.
2. An audience. Twitter and its users have the ability to reach a large number of people. Originally Twitter was envisioned as a means of real-time status updates between normal people. My impression is that this use case is basically dead. The vast majority of Twitter usage seems to be as a communication tool by celebrities. There is a business in that but it isn't the revolutionary communication tool it was once thought (and some still think) it to be.
So the camps in question (the API camp and the ad camp) fit into the above.
Owning infrastructure can be hugely lucrative (eg SMS). History is full of examples of this. Railroads, oil, telephony, etc. The problem is that you get too big and the government will intervene.
Messaging infrastructure is too important for one party to own it. Email is federated and open. The future of messaging is too (I believe) federated and open.
So that leaves (2), the ad camp. The problem with advertising on Twitter is the same as it is on Facebook: it's an unwelcome intrusion.
Perhaps Twitter could have (and may still be able to) build a display ad business but Twitter is still not a particularly mainstream product (and IMHO it doesn't look like it ever will be).
Perhaps Twitter could've had a subreddit/Facebook pages type hubrid model. Upvoting of Tweets is possibly interesting.
Of course this faces the same problem Digg had: few things are globally interesting. What's interesting to you is not necessarily interesting to me so you changing what I see is again an intrusion.
Basically "content gateways" (like Digg, Slashdot, etc) were I believe transitional. I don't believe you'll have a repeat of Digg moderators being paid to promote stories. You can (and people do) pay celebrities to retweet things but that still only goes to their followers. They have to consider their brands and building and keeping their respective audiences too.
Those thinking Twitter should have an open firehose (or close to it) are neglecting the reality that Twitter is a business and needs to make money somehow. Open access to their content greatly diminishes that.
Lastly, quite a few people will speak of "betrayed" by Twitter over API access. They also believe that developers were largely responsible for making Twitter popular. As I said (just yesterday) that this is inevitable. Become too successful and the platform subsumes you into their core offering (no one wants core features controlled by third parties). Developers were I believe largely incidental to Twitter's success. Twitter succeeded (as it were) because people used it. To take credit for that as a developer community is like saying that the automobile succeeded because of car wash stations and autoshops selling rims.
EDIT: one last point. It's popular, particularly on HN, to simply build an audience or something that scales without concern for monetization. I certainly understand the logic behind this. Sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't.
Twitter hasn't come up with a scalable business model yet because there isn't one. As much as founders can be praised for "swinging for the fences" and going all in, sometimes the best outcome is to be acquired because what you've developed isn't a viable independent business but could be an incredibly valuable part of a wider portfolio of products.
[+] [-] harryh|13 years ago|reply
Your impression is wrong in this case. Let's take something topical:
https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/eurocup
Look at all those people talking about the eurocup!
Also:
> The problem with advertising on Twitter is the same as it is on Facebook: it's an unwelcome intrusion.
You mean, like television commercials? Which are the foundation of an I don't even know how many billion dollar industry. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk they'll get this right but there's a lot of evidence out their in the world that eyeballs can be turned into money just about anywhere. It seems a bit hasty to just dismiss all of that.
There's also plenty of buying intent to work with like this:
https://twitter.com/AllMadeUp21/status/219518855091978240
That's just an example that took me 10 seconds to find. Get enough people talking and some of them are going to talk about things they want to buy.
[+] [-] cynicalkane|13 years ago|reply
Armchair economists like to discuss SMS as an example of oligopolies gone bad, but that doesn't pass the smell test. Telephone competition is suboptimal but SMS is uniquely bad in its outcomes; they've done a much better job on all other forms of data. Furthermore, costs vary from place to place but by all accounts SMS is still very expensive worldwide.
Well, it happens that SMS is a technical hack; the data payloads are snuck into the control channel. The bandwidth in this channel is very scarce. The message could be re-routed over the data network, but the cross-carrier costs are still expensive because the receiving phone might have to use the old implemnetation.
[+] [-] lazylland|13 years ago|reply
This meant ANY platform where a developer cared to bring out a Twitter client had it, and hence more people could jump in quickly.
Secondly, really creative users made Twitter what it is today with Retweets and Hashtags.
Twitter would be wise to not start an evaporative cooling effect.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|13 years ago|reply
They should charge for taking information out of the stream, like a polling company, or consumer research, or business intelligence.
Not for the stream, but for the firehose. And for specialized analysis of the firehose.
There would be massive value in knowing what everyone in the world is thinking about in real time.
Getting there should have been their goal.
[+] [-] guelo|13 years ago|reply
I had a hard time with the credibility of this analysis after that whopper. Twitter use continues to grow exponentially and is currently at 140 million active users with 340 million tweets per day. It is the third largest social network behind Facebook and LinkedIn.
[+] [-] kbronson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|13 years ago|reply
Advertising is a possibility but it would ultimately be a failure given the investment that has gone towards Twitter.
Paying for a premium Twitter account isn't going help either. For most people, Twitter doesn't help them make money or isn't a status symbol.
So perhaps the business model needs to be to help people get laid somehow. Listen, people want to either get rich or get laid - do 1 or the other and you'll make a lot of money.
[+] [-] ethank|13 years ago|reply
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html
I don't think the reaction would be nearly as bad if Twitter was better at making clients for their own service. They aren't very good at it. Twitter for Mac (née Tweetie) is dying on the vine.
TweetBot is 10x better on iOS than the native client, and Osfoora on the desktop.
Why not meet the challenge of an ecosystem in conjunction with ad revenue rather than just blanket rule against it?
[+] [-] rkudeshi|13 years ago|reply
It's not a question of good vs. bad, it's more like good vs. better (where better is a personal preference).
[+] [-] Aissen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|13 years ago|reply
There was a 3rd camp, those who wanted Twitter to become a protocol instead of a silo. From the sounds of it this camp must have been especially small. It's a shame, it was the only way to make it viable long-term.
[+] [-] adventureful|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 727374|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antirez|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Elepsis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregcohn|13 years ago|reply
I always loved the idea of Twitter as a communications bus for the internet. It probably would have been very challenging to monetize (though "we have all the data" as a thing to sell isn't bad, it works well for google in a search/1.0 context because they also have all the intent and all the UI around it).
It makes me wonder how much this set of decisions was driven by the amount of capital they raised and the need to demonstrate monetization.
It seems like deciding the business would be ad-supported was the first step toward becoming MySpace2.0.
[+] [-] state|13 years ago|reply
In the long run these two approaches may not actually be at odds with one another. AdWords-ish works for now, and as new apps are developed there may be an opportunity to move back in that direction.
[+] [-] jazzychad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
What is more frustrating is I don't ever want the mobile site (there's an app for that). I just want to be able to see tweets people like to.
[+] [-] dalton|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|13 years ago|reply
The engineers/product developers lost and the marketing won. It happens many times because developers are busy building value while marketing/business is scheming/planning/making deals. When this changes we will have more truly awesome products I believe, when Japan was seriously winning they were engineer and product focused but have business/marketing bloat destroying these products nowadays. Making needs as much focus as marketing.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
Marketing is actually really hard. The internet has also drastically altered how marketing happens, since the conversation now needs to be two-way (not just blasting out advertisements). The companies who do this the best don't get credit for great marketing because it just appear natural.
What is worse about this meme is it becomes poisonous inside companies. Instead of everybody working together to build the company, you can have people trying to satisfy agendas. Engineers focus on technology instead of products; marketing tells lies in an effort to force engineering down the path they want.
The only thing about this meme that has any value is that, at its core, the meme talks about providing real value instead of talking about value. But it is the height of arrogance to believe only engineers can create something of value.
[+] [-] nivertech|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgosser|13 years ago|reply
http://krisgosser.com/journal/2011/10/twitter-as-lifes-platf...
This article has similar thoughts: if only Twitter allowed us to combine other things like our cars, bodies, appliances, and jobs so that communication was actually useful instead of simply social.