Tearing down Twitter's walls

Remember those crazy days of e-mail when you couldn't send messages between systems? Microsoft Mail customers could only send mail within their enterprise or to other customers of Microsoft Mail (ditto for the other systems). It wasn't until SMTP standardized things that e-mail could move between systems.

E-mail was interesting then, but it didn't really become dominant until it standardized around the SMTP messaging protocol.

Are we experiencing the same thing with Twitter?

No Twitter is an island, entire of itself...

(Credit: Twitter)

Twitter has become hugely popular, but it remains a closed communication medium. Yes, it has opened its data stream and maintains an open API approach to its development, but Twitter is still a silo.

Yes, it's a big (and growing) silo, but then, so were AOL and Compuserve in their day.

There is a better way, and it's arguably the direction the industry is going to need to take for microblogging services like Twitter to become as big as e-mail. We need to standardize. We need an SMTP-like standard for microblogging.

And, frankly, we need an open-source implementation.

Open-source Sendmail was arguably the first messaging system to embrace SMTP. Sendmail gave would-be e-mail adopters a free (as in cost and freedom) e-mail system to explore, which led to Sendmail becoming the world's most popular message transfer agent.

Microblogging could use the same, and StatusNet's open-source micro-blogging software could well play that role. StatusNet is the company behind Identi.ca, the microblogging platform favored by the free and open-source crowd.

In terms of public blogging, Identi.ca is still more a curiosity than a real contender with Twitter. But, as in e-mail, it's probably not wise to underestimate the value of an open-source approach to standardizing microblogging intercommunications, particularly as microblogging enters the enterprise.

For example, enterprises that want to move beyond Twitter's one-size-fits-all approach to microblogging might prefer Yammer's microblogging-behind-the-firewall approach, an approach that StatusNet also offers. But StatusNet takes it further by enabling enterprises to set up a micro-blogging service that customers, employees, and partners could collaborate on. A private-public microblogging network, as it were, and completely based on open source and standards.

AOL once sat atop the consumer e-mail world, even as Twitter dominates microblogging today. Eventually, standards won out in e-mail. I expect we'll see much the same thing in microblogging. The question is, how long will it take?

[codynews]

oh god, just what we need, twitter and 'microblogging' to grow more than it has. Bleh.

/get off my lawn

Cody

[mrorie]

Just what we need, another comment about how much the commenter hates/doesn't get Twitter. Bleh.

[rollme]

Google has a service that will eclipse email, µBloggers, and collaboration apps altogether. It's called Wave.

[Silas0220]

Yeah, as soon as everyone figures out what to do with it. My friends and I have had Wave for some time now...we're still utterly confused.

[jjolsen]

Yeah, Wave (like the Segway) is an answer to an unasked question.

[philipdc]

Matt - I am with you that this is a good idea. Start the project and I will join you.

[SteveChicago]

And could we possibly come up with a standard for IM clients (w/ Voice & Video). Then I could use one client that I choose to. Perhaps go with the email address convention also. The I could be [e-mail] and from here I could do email, IM, mBlogging.

Why doesn't ISO get to work on this.

[daengbo]

There already is an IM standard. It's called XMMP ("Jabber"), and it's the protocol used by GTalk. It's federated, just like e-mail, Wave, and StatusNet. Federation means freedom.

Twitter is easy to sign onto, and has very low HTML overhead. It's easy to hop on and DM or @reply someone and, frankly, most Twitter users feature their blogs or websites providing alternate means of contacting them (i.e. giving their regular email address) on their profile pages.

I find it much more onerous to deal with Facebook email, which unlike Twitter DMs purports to actually be email. Now that's a closed email system, and a really buggy, code-heavy one at that. I never hear people complaining about Twitter and email. Ever. (I'm amazed you do.) But I hear people complain about Facebook's closed system all the time.

Myself included.

[foldsomething]

I tend to agree with you... Twitter is fine the way it is...

1. the many different clients that let you access it and view it in different flavors/custom schemes
2. unlike AOL and other fallen giants, I'm not paying to use twitter...

there were once IM wars, and you had to think for a second about which client to use, but ultimately people ended up signing up with multiple clients because they were all free... and then most of the IM clients allowed you to import contacts and chat with them regardless of what you or your friends preferred to use... The micro-blogging wars were quick and pretty decisive - Twitter won, Pownce and others (were there any others?) lost. Unless really big issues (bigger than the ones we've already seen) about security, reliability, privacy or cost to user come into play, there's no market pressure for users to switch to something other than Twitter.

[sarujan456]

enterprises that want to move beyond Twitter's one-size-fits-all approach to microblogging might prefer Yammer's microblogging-behind-the-firewall approach
<a href="http://watch-greek.org>sarujan</a>

[ShyamKapur]

I enjoyed this post greatly. I like the comments, too. More open the systems, the better for everyone. One can imagine extending this to other platforms like search, too, which can build upon existing open platforms. Folks might want to check out the new search tool TipTop http://FeelTipTop.com which is starting to emerge as one such open platform at the next level. It leverages the openness of Twitter. Openness feeds on openness to create a better world.