11–12 of 12 posts
We clearly need a open microblogging standard where Twitter updates would not be controlled solely by Twitter itself.
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"
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.
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.