Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.
sure, pg didnt communicate with the hindsight specificity i just did, but he was directionally correct for the approximately correct reason (without explicitly saying that "any new protocol must have critical adoption to be meaningful" but that is implied in pgland).
Certainly a different time.
Predicting that something will be a big deal and grow fast isn't what's at issue here. And yes, even in 2009 you could have made that prediction about Twitter.
The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition.
And we can now see that the end result is largely negative. It's not a public protocol, all of its content is behind a login wall. It didn't even join the fediverse.
Essentially, pg is imaginging something more like Bluesky or Mastodon and the fediverse, but for Twitter, which never came close to materializing.
I think Twitter will inevitably go down in history as being much more like an extended runtime edition of MySpace: yet another social network that became popular, made its founders who sold the company rich, but ultimately became a dying/dead entity under the next batch of management.
Every word has a literal definition, but every word also has an infinite variety of meaning, with nuance and subtlety that depends on context. It is quite obvious that Paul Graham didn't mean that Twitter was literally "another HTTP". I take the meaning to be something like "Twitter is an open platform that is widely-used enough to enable communication between other services" — not the case now, of course, but it certainly was at the time.
The same way giving people access to email opens up new behaviour, or access to networked computers allows new behaviour. Or similar to how Job's iPhone drove people to a new behaviour. Also, until they locked down their APIs in the name of control and monetization, it had a feel of access to a new protocol.* I am fully aware twitter is not an RPC specced protocol.
You both agree that expression is wrong. Why do you have to further recreate argument of the blog? These discussion based on loose associations are pointless and everyone will talk past each other.
On the other hand, the post is 100% wrong, it's not a protocol and to the extent it is, it was not innovative (How is it fundamentally different than facebook?)
I know this was written 15 years ago, but that's what's interesting about it, it's a remnant from a previous era and it shows what the hype was.