Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter's recent actions are the nerds. At this point Twitter has too much momentum for the nerds to have much (if any) influence. Building "open" technology isn't an effective method of social engineering here. I wish I knew a better alternative but I don't.

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.

View on HN

What about Twitter's actions that are yet to come?

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.

On Hacker News, we don't downvote someone just because we can't find the right words to describe how radically we disagree.

There really are two types of people in the world: lottery players and everyone else.

I am not exactly worried about getting downvoted but thanks anyway :-)

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 think the responses are more "dude, try something else, that won't work", which is quite a bit different.

what else?

> Even if the chances of success is 0.01% . . .

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.

That is a good method to make personal choices. But in the 'startup ecosystem' (pardon me) or the 'free market' the cost is privatized and the benefit of success is socialized.

The overall equation looks like this: success = (team1_success or team2_success or ... or teamn_success)

I was assuming that the calculation was from the standpoint of all society, considering most free software advocates consider themselves altruists. So our functions are the same in this case, and it is still possible for the project to not be a good idea based on expected value.

Hmmm. If we look at some past examples of cases in the consumer internet space where a new entrant overtook an entrenched player (e.g. Google vs. other search engines and Facebook vs. Myspace), I think you need to have something new and compelling about your application to drive adoption. I don't know of any cases where just cloning an existing app was successful for a startup. Has movement to a new player every been driven by openness concerns?

What can you do that is different from Twitter and cannot easily be copied by them?

If enough of us "nerds" get pissed of by the actions of Twitter, can't we ourselves provide the initial momentum for an open alternative, with HN having 80k daily uniques and all? Does it have to have better features? (although that will help)

Making something better is the easy part.

I'm sure you meant consumer facing applications, but I might as well point out that there exceptions in the general case.

Linux has nearly completely taken over from UNIX and it did this (at least originally) by simply being more open.

It's all about critical mass. If techies who care about it being open switch over and then it becomes the most popular amongst HN readers, then it can grow out from there.

In the general scheme of things, Twitter and Facebook have only just demonstrated that a market exists around their type of product. They'll be replaced at some point, but not by the services in the article.

Niche players might be able establish a de facto standard for shared profile data though.

> What about Twitter's actions that are yet to come?

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%.

Twitter also started out as a niche product "for the nerds": early adopters drive mass adoption. The fact that Twitter is a firmly entrenched player doesn't stop us from competing with a better, simpler product.

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.

I agree with your tone, but disagree with the conclusions.

   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.

A protocol is literally a standard or convention for communicating. In the case of twitter and facebook, the tools they provide for declaring social networks enables (arguably new) forms of social communication. Comparatively, SMTP, POP, HTTP, etc didn't require social scaffolding, or at least, it was not the central element. Without the social scaffolding, twitter and Facebook are useless; without social scaffolding, SMTP and POP still let me communicate with friends I already know.

(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.)

Twitter is doing this because at some point they have to monetize, and that probably means showing ads. Some users will get annoyed by ads, and that will mean a bigger market for an ad-free alternative.

I think Jabber has had a reasonable success in a very closed space.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com