Is There an Opening for an Alternative to Twitter?

We've had open-source alternatives like http://identi.ca/ for years; and in my memory, these have always been faster to implement new features that Twitter itself has been. Yet Twitter, not identi.ca, caught on in the public.

So the question is really not whether there is an opening for a Twitter alternative and what features we would want it to have, but rather why the existing alternatives with strictly more features failed to catch on.

My take is that Twitter had already passed a threshold by the time these alternatives hit the scene, and their first-mover advantage carried them a long way in defending themselves against other similar-but-incompatible platforms.

Put another way, the reason Twitter is singular and email providers are not is that email providers communicate with each other over a common open protocol, whereas Twitter communicates only using its (closed) API.

The difficulty would not be in defining an open protocol to doing what Twitter does, naturally; existing ones could be tweaked slightly to achieve the same result. (Look at what Shortmail is doing while maintaining 100% backwards-compatibility with traditional email).

The problem is that Twitter has no incentive to turn its "open" (read: closed) API into an completely open means of communication like email, because doing so would squander the one huge asset it already has: a captive userbase.

(For the record, the same arguments could apply just as well to Facebook; people just don't think about Facebook that way, because we're all so used to them being a walled garden).

A twitter replacement could gain traction if they practically duplicated twitter's api so they could try and convince 3rd party devs(the people who made twitter) to support this new service in their apps. But really, twitter has to make money. This is no different from any other service. Even if all the 'nerds' leave twitter they will still have millions of users and will continue to be a huge service for 'normal' people. Just like Facebook.

What you want exists in OStatus, the successor to OpenMicroBlogging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus)

The problem with treating a centralized service provider as a public utility is you end up ceding control of your namespace to an organization that has a different motivation than you may.

The solution would be, as an organization, to host your own status update service on your own domain.

I think we really need an alternative to Twitter and it could be a service which simply runs alongside Twitter. There are many features which would make Twitter a better service. One area which is a little neglected is simply having a online identity for the purpose of logging into multiple resources on the web and from applications. This is done now with Twitter as well as Facebook but many are concerned about privacy due to the fact that social networks sustain themselves with advertising. Providing at least an identity service which carefully handles privacy would be a good start that would get more people on board.

Then there has to be a way to segment the noise. Discussions about some TV show or a ballgame can suddenly fill up your Twitter stream. It would help if these conversations could happen in a category or topic that would allow you to choose to participate or ignore. Twitter is not really set up to do this right now.

Twitter also does not aggregate trends very well. Being able to ping a service with your status such as your location and/or activity could be aggregated and done so anonymously if you choose. I'd use this sort of service to share what I am watching or listening to so that the trends can be captured. I would like to know what music is popular in my area or what movie everyone seems to being seeing. And I would also open it up to locations with the goal of making people aware of more of what is going on around them. I'd like to have people select a persona or demographic they identify with so they can better discover things which would be more of interest to them. And these interests can go well beyond music, movies and restaurants. Ideally it would include events in your community to foster a greater sense of community which Twitter is not capable of doing.

I hope this does emerge. It seems it is a matter of time but the success of Twitter, as it is now, is preventing something else from catching on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines strikes again!

There's no room for an alternative to Twitter. Social media on the scale of Twitter and Facebook is a winner take all market due to network effects.

Is there an opportunity for Twitter to become the next MySpace?

Certainly. However, a Twitter alternative will probably never fly. Instagram is a great example of how to make Twitter the next MySpace. Find something that users do all the time on twitter and make it suck less. API revocation is not something most users know they have a problem with.

What's in it for the user? I saw talk about APIs and anger over promoted tweets. Users don't know what an API is. They know when their favorite app doesn't integrate with their favorite service, but this hypothetical Twitter rival has to already be a favorite service.

How do you accomplish that? "Service You Don't Use is now deeply integrated with all your favorite apps". So what?

And I don't think many users are that outraged about promoted tweets.

You can ship a Twitter alternative after a weekend of coding. Then you can sit back and listen to the crickets.

I don't see a huge problem with the Twitter idea or its feature set. The big problem I see is that it's yet another data silo. One of the hottest communication technologies to come around in years is owned by a single entity.

Maybe a decentralized competitive technology is a more interesting place to go. Something that works more how email or the web does. It so far hasn't worked for Diaspora*, but how about the same concept vs. Twitter?

What about Jaiku? http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/

I've kicked around ideas for something similar to, but not exactly like Twitter. I think there is possibly a market for more controlled, but still fairly frictionless information sharing similar to Twitter.

For example: A group of us from the same company are going to JavaOne - how do we do stuff like share snippets about sessions we thought were useful or broadcast where and when we are going for dinner? Twitter itself isn't great for that, email lists are cumbersome and tricky to use from mobile - but if you could quickly create a group of some sort and have everyone join it, it would be fairly easy.

It could also help avoid spam issues that plague Twitter - a while back, my previous employer held a small conference and gave out hashtag to use when tweeting about it. Spammers quickly co-opted the hashtag, which rendered it useless (this was doubly embarrassing since a lot of the spam was adult-oriented and my previous employer was a religious organization).

Giving out a group + simple password would have dealt with that situation.

I see a lot of potential uses for something like this, but whether you could convince enough people to use (and even more, pay for) it, I'm not sure.

Two problems:

(i) things like this have a very low ARPU; this makes it hard to write a business plan that people will take seriously.

(ii) two-sided market. if you want to read tweets, go to twitter. if you want people to read your tweets, go to twitter.

two-sided markets can be attacked by removing one of the sides; for instance, a site that lets you read or write tweets while also letting you read or write into their systems.

Twitter controls the API precisely to prevent that attack.

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In general though I think there could be a market for something where people pay some $ to have a better social media experience or to look "cooler" than other people. I think anything people spend above $20k for a car, for instance, is because people want to be seen driving a Lexus or BMW. If people could turn their cash into visible social media status, you could kick Facebook to the curb in terms of ARPU.

Premium accounts on LinkedIn are a model, except for the fact that premium accounts on LinkedIn have practical value -- if a $50 a month subscription helps a recruiter get one commission for filling a position, that's a great investment.

The power of twitter is how frictionless it is to share. You don't have to sweat over every time who will see it, what your friends will think about it, and how it will look because by design there is no visual and privacy decisions. I believe if anything new that comes along it needs to maintain this aspect and not clutter it with settings and features.

But isn't the real question from consumer's perspective: What is it that Twitter (or others including Facebook) fail to solve? How can a solution be defined so it is just as frictionless?

And since Twitter is a platform, richer sharing solutions or parallel communities (Instagram, Pinterest, Picdish) are being built that just take advantage of the post to Twitter. In this case the power of Twitter is the existing community.

In my view, the future are sharing tools and platforms that are 1) simply more aware of what we are doing and 2) also allow us to be more aware of what others are doing to enable more meaningful 1-to-1 connections.

"It raises the question about whether there is an opportunity for an alternative to Twitter to emerge, and what it would take for it to establish a foothold."

I'd say there certainly is an opportunity for an alternative to Twitter or any established site, just as there was room for Facebook to dethrone MySpace and Google to dethrone Yahoo! and all the rest.

The much harder part is establishing a foothold. Twitter was founded by an established player and gained initial users from the core tech people long before it gained wide acceptance. Facebook had Harvard and college campuses long before the parents of those students joined Facebook.

What group will adopt the Twitter alternative first?

So is the best solution for this a federated, open-standards approach ala XMPP? It seems to me you could even use XMPP as the backbone for an open, federated short message service.

Before anyone mentions G+ and how difficult it is to replace an existing social network, it's important to consider how lower the barrier of entry is for Twitter. Leaving FB means leaving your pictures and friendships. That said, leaving Twitter means leaving your posts and followers. The question is - is the price of switching platforms low enough?

Do you guys feel that if Pownce was never shut down - it would have been a pretty big competitor/threat to Twitter?