This Twitter thing is getting out of hand. I've been in technology for a long time, and while I've never been a 1st tier early adapter, I am and have been on the front lines and usually in the second or third wave of the early adopter set on the Internet. I still don't completely get Twitter, and I probably won't any time soon because I'm not immersed on a minute-by-minute basis in the minute expansions and contractions of the bubble as people inside the echo chambers of the Web2.0 startup/VC/media crowd are. Read: I don't have enough friends and/or colleagues on the bleeding edge to make this limited service useful to me. A brilliant intern last summer showed me the tumblog he and a friend had built in RoR, and I was impressed with the functionality, but the only way I could imagine the usefullness of such a thing would be with widespread adoption. Twitter has apparently reached the first-stage critical mass that it's a phemonenon inside the echo chamber, but remains unknown and relatively useless to the world at large - including the vast majority of the population with broadband access.
But being in the industry (if not in the beating heart of it), I pay attention. Recently I've been seeing more and more conversations decrying the state of Twitter and whether it will survive, what should be done to make sure it survives and whether it should survive at all in its current incarnation. Articles such as this one at TechCrunch with it's obvious allusion to drug addiction are increasingly disturbing. If you thought information addiction was a problem before, the instantaneous gratification provided by Twitter is as crack is to the cocaine of an always on broadband connection and good feed reader. Some people need to take a step back and get some perspective.
Having said that, I can see how this is potentially game changing. The way that Microsoft's Live Mesh is moving things to the next level of connectivity is going to be useful for a vast majority of people. I have already used Live Mesh in my first 3 days of being signed up to ease the transfer of data and information for both work and personal needs. Twitter, on the other hand, requires either an established community requiring such real-time connection and/or a perceived need to be able to follow and be part of specific conversations surrounding specific topics. It's not for the masses...yet.
The problems that Steve Gilmour references in his article are specific to the current user base, but they do not address what I believe will be necessary to make it useful to the population at large. I'll try to refrain from further social commentary here, but thinking out loud on the topic produces a few ideas on how to make it so.
To make the 'platform' useful to the general population (considering the technical limitations that Twitter has experienced) it will indeed need to be decentralized. Gilmour speaks of namespace issues and he is correct in doing so, but with the increasing adoption of OpenID, I believe his fears may be unfounded. It comes back to control of an online identity (or several), and that is precisely the problem that OpenID is intended to solve. Critical mass of the size required to take it mainstream might easily be found by tapping the existing userbase of IM networks.
What if...one were to create an OpenID based login that could simultaneously publish to multiple IM networks with a simple tick box to include a comment into the Twitter network. OpenID providers could be convinced to offer Twitter message hosting as a feature/incentive, thus obviating the need for a central network and thus avoid the outages recently experienced. Include a multiple network client such as Pidgin and you have a ready-made solution based on existing technology.
With the level of adoption this expansion could foster, we might very well introduce the benefits of this kind of communication across the Internet as a whole and bring whole new sets of users into the conversation. Then, I could see the appeal - as would millions of others.
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