twitter and XMPP
A chain of thought I had this morning:
- Twitter is fun and (tentatively) tremendously useful, albeit difficult to explain
- Twitter is a centralized proprietary service, and thus prone to issues of scaling (outages), and privacy.
- Twitter is not magic technology --XMPP and SMS gateways could basically do everything it does now.
- That's nice and all, but Twitter has the user-base.
- XMPP has a track record of being Really Cool Technology that languishes in obscurity due to its lack of user-friendly implementations and wide user-base adoption.
- Google saved XMPP from a similar languishing death in the world of Instant Messaging by adopting this open standard as the basis for Google Talk.
- Conclusion: Google needs to re-factor Google Talk to be/add a twitter-alike service.
Maybe?
"That’s nice and all, but Twitter has the user-base."
...and therin lies the rub. There are other system out there like twitter and more feature-rich, but twitter wins because twitter has the users.
=C=
If only there were some company with pockets deep enough to build something better and buy Twitter. :)