My Quiet Life

Some quick thoughts about twitter I’ve been meaning to jot down:

• The solution to twitter’s problems will not be twitter. This is not a prediction made because I bear ill will towards twitter — they had a cool idea and ran with it. It’s because the problem with twitter is that it’s a service that requires a distributed server/client base and a messaging protocol, and instead they built it on the web using a centralized infrastructure. It has nothing to do with how they built it, or the technology they chose. It’s not because they used Ruby on Rails instead of symfony. The successor to twitter will be something built with XMPP or something similar — a messaging protocol that is actually designed to be doing what twitter aims for.
• Twitter is probably the largest working example of a web of trust. I don’t mean this in the traditional cryptographic sense, but rather in the sense of regular personal trust. Already, via twitter, I’ve been introduced to a wealth of people that I’d normally not only have no reason to be talking to, but that also would have no reason to believe I wasn’t just another freak on the Internet (which of course I am, but don’t tell anyone). By virtue of a simple click to see who’s “following” someone, you get the instant verification that “oh, this person is good people.” It’s pretty cool.
• How I explain twitter to people: it’s a chatroom on the web where you’re gagging/ignoring everyone in the world by default.

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?

Aunt B is a recent twitter convert and not really getting it. I confess I am still sorta borderline myself. But, I have a long history of scoffing at innovative ideas early on and then looking like an idiot later. When Mirabilis came out with ICQ, my friend Nick showed it to me. “Hey cool,” he said, “you can message people in realtime!!” “Big deal,” I scoffed, scoffingly, “there’s a little thing called talk(1) in UNIX that has existed practically forever.”

So, twitter has been something recently I’ve been trying to keep an open mind about. What is it? Wikipedia says: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application. Okay, but. What is it, really?

I think of twitter as basically a web-based chatroom where you have everyone on ignore by default. The interesting thing about it is that not everyone thinks of it that way. Some people treat it as microblogging and only visit it periodically. Conversely, some people have twitter piped right to their IM client and treat it as another form of instant messaging. (Interestingly, I have a feeling these people annoy the piss out of the former folks.) So far, I’m ambivalent. It’s cool every once in a while for rapid dissemination of information, or relaying info to a person but giving other people an opportunity to comment on it. Like I said, it’s like a web-based chatroom that can be piped into other mediums (email, web, XMPP/jabber, SMS, etc). I use it primarily via jabber, but the trick is knowing when to shut it off. When I’m heads-down working at the office, I just can’t handle the deluge of updates on who’s drinking what caffeineated beverage at the moment or whatever.

You can also discriminate who you get IM notifications from and who you don’t, which is sortof nice. So, in conclusion, I think it’s a neat technology — the crux of it being that it’s basically a method for disseminating information through a gateway that makes it available in whatever medium you want: IM, SMS, Web, etc. The only problem with it I see is that it’s centralized in one commercial entity. And that it can get really annoying. But I’m learning that the trick is realizing you can control fairly well what you don’t get, what you do get, and how you get it.