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Comment by forkandwait | Hacker News Reader

Is the sms -> internet/ server -> sms pathway tied up in business patents by Twitter? I am sure I am (sort of) underestimating, but Twitter seems like a weekend project for a couple of decent hackers; if they piss enough people off is there any reason to stick with them except for (VERY non-trivial) first past the post market share?

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Ooh, another "it's just a weekend project!" comment.

Next step: convince everyone to use your weekend project, instead of Twitter. Allowing people to import all of their tweets and friends would be helpful, so be sure to implement that.

Next next step: Handle all of Twitter's traffic. Consistently, and you not only have to do it better than they did in the beginning, but better than they do it now.

Here's the thing. If it were anything other than a major endeavor to replace twitter it would have been done by now.

It is a big problem and not just from an engineering standpoint. The same for facebook.

On the plus side, for competition at least, as hardware technology advances it'll become easier and cheaper to match twitter's capabilities with less effort.

Also create mobile clients for everybody to use. And don't forget about an API.

I don't think this will be an issue if he manages to maintain the same API as Twitter.

How many Twitter clients support third-party API endpoints?

Ironically, I believe Tweetie 2 used to, before Twitter bought it. It allowed a lot of advanced customization.

It actually still does, for now. I wonder if the #dickbar shows up on third-party timelines...

No.

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Twitter&btnG=Search+Pate...

Although they did make Loren Brichter patent "pull to refresh":

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Loren+Brichter&btnG=Sear...

Also, please don’t be "I could clone that in a weekend" guy. Everyone hates that guy.

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-ha...

You could make a piece of crap implementing Twitter’s models and create/read/update/delete in a weekend. Or really, in under an hour with Rails scaffolding. Congratulations, you have now proved that you can guess the schema from using an app. You don’t have a product, or even one tenth of a product.

First-past-the-post has nothing to do with Twitter’s success; polish and thought and sweating the details has everything to do with it.

I don't know why you got so many down votes. Maybe HN folks got too sick of armchair architects/hackers. Honestly, what your said somehow resonated my inside hacker. I think lots of hackers share similar opinion --- as hardware/network are getting so much cheaper nowadays, it may be very feasible to build and operate "web-scale" apps like Twitter and Reddit with small but capable man powers. Lots of people here agree that the main problem is less of a technical one, but more of a business one --- how to jump start a community in an area especially with a seemingly winning market leader over there. Perhaps, there are still opportunities in the area. Maybe Twitter will be the next Google or maybe not.

Back to the topic, three months ago someone went ahead and pulled off a high-performance (no sure its scalability) Twitter clone in C. I recalled it's a good discussion on such a topic.

Discussion can be found on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/comments/f16mw/ive_never_been_impresse...

Its website is at http://blerg.dominionofawesome.com/

Instead of doing that, a team of one computer literate person could fork StatusNet, and you could spend the rest of the weekend trying to convince Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen to join your service, and buying hardware to support them.

Rather than downvoting my rather heavily caveatted remarks, perhaps you could answer the question: Is there a patent encumbrance that makes this more than a technical problem?

EDIT: moved "heavily qualified" to something more idiomatic.

No, there's probably not a patent encumbrance. IANAL.

But there's so much more that makes it more than just a technical problem. Ask your random 40-year-old working in a non-tech industry if they've heard of Twitter. Now ask them if they've heard of StatusNet or identi.ca.

In a nutshell, that is what makes it more than just a technical problem.

Since it's sometimes considered nice to explain a downvote, I wanted to mention I downvoted you for spending time telling us how qualified you were instead of just restating your question in a simpler way.

I don't know why your other post was downvoted, but probably because people think it's not an interesting question, could be determined by actually going to Google yourself and doing your own homework/search and most people don't feel like patents, if they exist, are the problem with twitter's dominance.

Actually -- by saying "very qualified remarks" forkandwait was not talking about his/her education. S/He was instead referring to the fact that by calling the problem of getting market share "(VERY non-trivial)" in the OP - they were well aware of the issue and asking a simple question about twitter's patent protection (or lack thereof).

Well, you don't seem to understand what "qualified" means in the context written -- when I said that my response was qualified it meant that I put caveats around it ("I qualified my response"). Sorry if I was unclear.

Ah ha. I understand how it could have been used in that context, just failed to understand that it was. Thanks for clarifying.

Literacy fail.

FWIW: Being wrong abut an ambiguous grammar is not a failure of literacy.

Also, your comments contribute what to this discussion?

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