Burned by Twitter, Developers Launch Distributed Microblogging Service
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That being said, I never understood why everyone (including pg) referred to Twitter as this great new protocol. It's 100% proprietary and this type of decision should have been easily predicted. SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs.
But good for the developers. The seem passionate about the idea and are building it. Kudos.
And why not just try? What if the open platform succeeds? Even if the chance of success is 0.01%, it is worth trying. Also, a million such attempts by million such teams can fail. Only one team needs to succeed. Once.
What can you do that is different from Twitter and cannot easily be copied by them?
Linux has nearly completely taken over from UNIX and it did this (at least originally) by simply being more open.
If chance of success * probable value of outcome + (the converse of failure) - cost > 0, it's worth it. Is that really the case here? Personally I think you are overestimating chance of success by a wide margin.
The overall equation looks like this: success = (team1_success or team2_success or ... or teamn_success)
Niche players might be able establish a de facto standard for shared profile data though.
No telling. That's the point.
> And why not just try?
Because human hours are the most valuable asset on this planet. If you have a .01% chance of success then it's not necessarily worth trying. But that's up to the person who's putting in the time. In this case some people do believe it's worth it and by all means they should try.
I just wonder if there's an option that's more than .01%.
There really are two types of people in the world: lottery players and everyone else.
I guess I should elaborate on my previous comment: I am saying that there is no reason to look at someone actually trying something big and say "Dude, give up! It won't work!" no matter how rooted in reality you think your choices are.
IMHO it is not helpful or interesting to view the world in binary terms as "lottery players and everyone else". In the risk profile continuum, you're drawing a line at your max risk tolerance level and viewing it as a binary choice. But it is a continuum. Someone else may view everyone not working for the government with pension benefits as a lottery player.
I completely agree that "open" is not the great differentiator that will attract endless droves of users. While it makes the platform more attractive to developers and those who share this mindset, the average user's priority is neither owning their data nor using "open" technologies. What we do have, however, is the opportunity and enthusiasm to build something new and exciting with a community of greatly talented individuals.
Unfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter's recent actions are the nerds.
...
SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs.
(That being said, I would have preferred that Twitter was a distributed and open protocol from the start; however, I'm not going to switch to an open product just because it's open. I want the more accessible and wider cast social network.)
First there was ICQ, Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL, etc. And now it seems that you can talk to anybody in any network. And jabber provided a way to create your own network.
I think in the end Openness wins. It's just a marathon not a sprint.
I hope everyone's creating machine images for these projects. It should take two minutes to start your own microblogging site - ideally with as little technical involvement as possible.
First of all, ensure privacy with public key cryptography. Sign tweets for authenticity. Retweets can just be additional signatures.
If a distributed microblogging protocol was interoperable with twitter and user friendly, it would probably be able to siphon people off of twitter proper. Certainly it would be an attractive alternative to anyone who NEEDED the service, and that's the important thing, right? Hopefully work out a way so that tweets on twitter.com can be captured and distributed in this P2P network. These tweets could be unsigned since if you include a link to the original tweet they can be verified.
Defining protocols instead of providing services democratizes a layer of the OSI model. We need to think deeper than that, though. We need to democratize the physical layer as well. Luckily we've proven that you don't need a high bandwidth link to be useful in a crisis situation. Twitter will do. To that end, I suggest that this project make an even more lofty goal:
Create a small embedded device interoperable with this P2P microblogging network. The device can communicate with peers over a Software Defined Radio. The device should be capable of bridging to a wi-fi or 3g network. This would accomplish the democratization of the physical layer which is so important to combat censorship and oppression.
You can't monetize democracy. This is why these projects will only happen on a volunteer/charity basis.
Due to personal issues and a tight deadline it was not featureful as I wished but it worked, although there is a central point that works as gateway to the overlay.
Anyway, after this point, it works fully decentralized.
For extra points, allows several such devices within range of each other to automatically create an ad hoc mesh network.
It's pretty great stuff -- I have a StatusNet instance on my website, and people can follow me from other StatusNet instances, I can follow them; it really is decentralized Twitter.
'Because Twitter is mean' doesn't pull many users.
Fail.
The signup button goes to a "Internal Server Error" as described above. He wasn't bashing anyone.
It's not because Twitter's technology is any more superior. It's the simple thing called 'network effects'.
Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, I think Twitter is too far along for their momentum to be stopped.
Valiant attempt, and kudos to the developer(s) for actually getting it launched - but this is definitely like spitting in the wind....imho of course.
I agree, and the solution must be to provide a service that is useful even when not many people are using it. For example, could an rstat.us account be set up so that everything published on it is automatically republished on the user's Twitter and facebook accounts, and any replies from those places published back to rstat.us?
And the beauty of it: the way the technology works (OStatus), every time somebody does this, the overall network gets larger. In my opinion, it's really only a matter of time.
I would wager to say that by now 95% of all Twitter users don't give a crap about the technology.
They just want Twitter to work.
Twitter solves a problem that people didn't realize they had before. The ability to easily see what people are currently doing - the 140 character limitation is a godsend for brevity.
Because Twitter invented that space, it is going to be VERY difficult to unseat them.
At this point, only Twitter can unseat Twitter - quite frankly.
If they get to the point of providing users a viable alternative, then it has worked. It doesn't have to be 10M users.
That's when it all falls down, of course. And you can't follow people on Twitter?
http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23stoprightthere
None of these people care, I'm afraid.
(I prefer to register for sites using my email address, and then link to my FB and Twitter accounts. In case I ever decide to delete either of the latter, other services like rstat.us won't be affected.)
(See other comment re: email)
Their biggest hurdle is going to be apathy due to a lack of comprehension. The more noob-friendly rstat.us is, the better their chances.
They've actually done much better than most, but it really can't be dumbed down enough. There should be a clear barrier between text for developers, and text for everyone else. I really wish them luck. It's a noble effort.
The underlying concept is actually a pretty heady idea to non-tech folk. It might not hurt to get a bunch of them and bounce things off of them until you see their light bulb turn on. Best of luck!
1) All clients start implementing the "open" protocol next to the Twitter. So send each message twice. 2) Someone takes the Twitter firehose and screws it into the "open" protocol.
You would have a bit of noise but you would then have a legitimate choice: "open" or twitter. If the number of people using the "open" alternative/protocol achieved critical mass you would have something.
Maybe this is why Twitter is clamping down on clients. Undermining the popularity of clients prevents the first item.
And Twitter would never allow anyone to use the firehose for this purpose.
So, pretty unlikely.
There is plenty of vertical development that can be done by third parties, no need to focus on creating your own client.
In programming, twitter is like the IE mini-browser control you can drop into a window and create your own 'custom' browser. Clients like that aren't needed. Instead use the data in a new way, or provide a new data stream by tracking something in real life.
Great to see OStatus gaining traction.
Is there space in the OStatus spec for an email-like username/service format? I'd like to be able to add someone on identi.ca by typing theirhandle@identi.ca, for example, rather than having to copy and paste a link to their atom feed. Or would that be too confusing? If so, is there a more user-friendly alternative?
The threaded microblogging model supports far deeper interaction than the way Twitter works.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...