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Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

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Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#61

Post by davewiner »

mvzink wrote: post #8
bntly wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are celebrities and that hot girl from high-school within that walled garden.It sucks and i wish the products were better and more open but the bar for entry is mostly user draw, and T&A is what draws them in.. *edited for spelling >_>

You just made me think of something. The common folk may as well continue using Twitter, and you're right about the bar to entry. We few, the vanguard of openness and reliability, can use approaches like Dave Winer's to provide an open, durable parallel "Twitter-like ecosystem" that integrates with Twitter—and once Twitter goes away (and Facebook and Google+ and even SMS) we will integrate with its successor—or hopef…

You got it baby!

That's exactly the idea. It's a bootstrap. You use the systems that are in place now to boot up the successor.

It's never either/or. You use everything that works, that has people on it that you need to reach, as long as they welcome you.

This has been the problem with Google-Plus. They don't have an API that lets you post to it. But Twitter does. To everyone who follows me on Twitter, they don't have any idea that I'm not really on their network. In every sense that matters I am.

But when Twitter goes down, I keep posting, and people who are hooked in my feed still get the new stuff.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#62

Post by sp332 »

dasht wrote: post #32

"3. To identify users -- please use DNS." Using DNS to identify users is unwise, in my opinion, because it means that people won't own their own on-line identities -- they'll have to rent them and for real money, too. And if some users are assigned a sub-domain on a shared domain, their identity won't be portable. I think it is worth doing a little extra work to make a user name system that doesn't have those problem…

That's true of email as well, though.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#63

Post by joering2 »

unimpressive wrote: post #52

Hacking together a microblogging system out of RSS and Atom with a little network glue is fine for a prototype. But in the long run you won't beat Facebook and Twitter by merely replicating their functionality.

hm, don't be so sure. I was of your opinion and recently changed that when learnt about Instagram success.

It seems like internet is still a very young thing and people jump the ship or move on to a new thing very often, without much sentiment, like a child on a playground going from one toy to another.

Twitter introduced photos sharing long time ago, but it didn't stop guys from Insta to literally rip it off (adding "follows" and similar features). Where one thought "well I cannot build photo sharing service because the giant in the room (twitter) just introduced it" -- the others just continued pushing the code and eventually exit for $1B.

I think at some point users will move on from Facebook like they did from MySpace. MySpace biggest problem was javascript, audio and graphical clutter that rape you fresh out of the screen once the page finished loading. So others (hello Facebook) took advantage of it and come up with similar page but this time nice fresh and cleancut. So let's move further and ask ourselves a question: what is the biggest Facebook problem? I believe right now it is overclutter with irrelevant info served from your network. Having more than 100 "friends" makes your wall so clutter than no information is of value anymore.

So you want to come up with Facebook killer? no problem -- just build a system (whether mechanical or manual) where users can take real advantage out of their network, not miss important update from important friends and miss the unnecessary garbage they are not interested in. Don't be fooled by "oh they wont come because they did all this work building up their facebook profiles". Not only there is FB Api that you can connect to and download all FB user data in minutes, but if FB would close that gate, you can still program a info scrapper that would do so.

Bottom line: Facebook won't be here forever, and next stage of social is million connected friends but only relevant info rendered.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#64

Post by dasht »

mapgrep wrote: post #59
dasht wrote: post #32

"3. To identify users -- please use DNS." Using DNS to identify users is unwise, in my opinion, because it means that people won't own their own on-line identities -- they'll have to rent them and for real money, too. And if some users are assigned a sub-domain on a shared domain, their identity won't be portable. I think it is worth doing a little extra work to make a user name system that doesn't have those problem…

Inventing a new identity system that features 1, portability and 2, end-user price of $0 is surely possible, but surely more than "a little extra work." DNS has the virtue of being here now, being tested and refined over multiple decades, and offering a choice between subdomains for free or portability for a nominal annual cost. It's not perfect but it's good.

To avoid building in a dependency on DNS does not require that the identity system problem be fully solved, first. It only requires ensuring a good abstraction barrier before too much code propagates that depends directly on DNS. For example, perhaps, URIs.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#65

Post by dasht »

mapgrep wrote: post #60
dasht wrote: post #33

"4. A user is a feed. So the name points to a feed." What if the user wants to have more than one feed? Or wants, sometime down the road, to have routable resources that are not feeds? Wouldn't it be better to say that a user name is a user name and that a default feed name can be automatically built given just the user name?

This makes the "Twitter-like" system less "Twitter-like". Don't get me wrong, I see your point, and I can think of a technical solution (point to OPML feed collections instead of feeds), but the further this gets from the original popular thing (Twitter) the less support and momentum it's going to have, imho. On Twitter it's one stream per user, and that keeps things simple. And simplicity is a huge part of the value…

I agree that "emulate the user==feed simplicity of twitter" is the best counter-argument to "make the user name distinct from the feed name for greater flexibility" position.

But here:

In twitter APIs, can't you get something like, say, a user's avatar image by keying off the user name?

So, even on twitter, a user name maps to multiple different things -- not just a single feed.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#66

Post by davewiner »

unimpressive wrote: post #52

Hacking together a microblogging system out of RSS and Atom with a little network glue is fine for a prototype. But in the long run you won't beat Facebook and Twitter by merely replicating their functionality.

Beating them is not in the cards.

If you look at tech industry cycles the leaders don't get beat, they run out of room to grow, or evolve into something less monolithic.

Hegemony is always short lived. Once you get on top of the heap it's usually a short time before there's a new generation rising up.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#67

Post by aprendo »

riffic wrote: post #17

Over and over I emphasize that Twitter is not a public utility. If you're an organization that has to get your micromessage out there, you're better off hosting your own services.

No, you won't. You will be dramatically worse off. You have to go where your users are. And they are on Twitter, not your own hosted thing.

Twitter will not make or break most organizations. If it were to disappear tomorrow most any organization will have plenty of time to look for alternatives. In the meantime Twitter wins. Always. By a mile.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#68

Post by mvzink »

glhaynes wrote: post #58
mvzink wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just made me think of something. The common folk may as well continue using Twitter, and you're right about the bar to entry. We few, the vanguard of openness and reliability, can use approaches like Dave Winer's to provide an open, durable parallel "Twitter-like ecosystem" that integrates with Twitter—and once Twitter goes away (and Facebook and Google+ and even SMS) we will integrate with its successor—or hopef…

I can at least provide my own guarantees that it will be around (so long as some few others use it) Isn't this exactly the problem? Keeping a service alive in perpetuity is missing the point because it's the communication that's important, not the service upon which the communication flows... Human communication is inherently temporally limited. If you ignore that, you're not gonna be heard now, which makes you even…

Aha, I didn't understand at all before your edit (no offense :P), and I think you have a good point, but it is actually on the "pro" side for approaches like Winer's: the hypothetical "Twitter-like ecosystem" is targeting now, just like Twitter (less the realtime-related problems, sadly), but is set up to continue targeting "now" once nobody uses Twitter, even during the transition period!

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#69

Post by mvzink »

davewiner wrote: post #61
mvzink wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just made me think of something. The common folk may as well continue using Twitter, and you're right about the bar to entry. We few, the vanguard of openness and reliability, can use approaches like Dave Winer's to provide an open, durable parallel "Twitter-like ecosystem" that integrates with Twitter—and once Twitter goes away (and Facebook and Google+ and even SMS) we will integrate with its successor—or hopef…

You got it baby! That's exactly the idea. It's a bootstrap. You use the systems that are in place now to boot up the successor. It's never either/or. You use everything that works, that has people on it that you need to reach, as long as they welcome you. This has been the problem with Google-Plus. They don't have an API that lets you post to it. But Twitter does. To everyone who follows me on Twitter, they don't hav…

Good to know I got the point! :P Can I ask about your thoughts on StatusNet?

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#70

Post by riffic »

aprendo wrote: post #67
riffic wrote: post #17

Over and over I emphasize that Twitter is not a public utility. If you're an organization that has to get your micromessage out there, you're better off hosting your own services.

No, you won't. You will be dramatically worse off. You have to go where your users are. And they are on Twitter, not your own hosted thing. Twitter will not make or break most organizations. If it were to disappear tomorrow most any organization will have plenty of time to look for alternatives. In the meantime Twitter wins. Always. By a mile.

Do you trust Twitter? Do you believe that they will have the same motivations that you do, as an organization? I believe that is the fundamental question you should be asking.

I'm not really sure it matters where the users are. Ideally in a well designed system/protocol, it shouldn't matter. Email solved that problem 30 years ago.

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