Twitter is not public infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is not public infrastructure

tumblelog.marco.org

55 pointspclark29 comments

I couldn't agree with this more. It goes back to the "should Twitter be taking usernames from people?" discussion we had here a week or so ago. Twitter is free. You're not paying for it. It doesn't owe you anything. Plan accordingly.

On the flip side, this begs the question "When is Twitter going to start charging to use the API?" It seems clear that there is some demand for it.

If Twitter begins to charge for API access and reports even the slightest success in doing so, expect the rest of the social web to follow suit in the fashion of the economic bailouts.

Is anyone making money with Twitter API? Are they still in this recession?

The chance they will have success charging for their api is low. They might still report success since it's in their interests to do so.

Twitterific is making money from it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

It is a logical fallacy to beg the question.

Step 1: Define question begging.

Step 2: Show that the statement does not use your definition of question begging.

Hoisted by your own circular logic, question-begging petard!

Given the section on colloquial usage,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question#Contempora...

I'd say that's rather prescriptive, maybe even SNOOTy.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html

That's what I said the first time I got zapped for that, but the one said, "'Begs the question' is a technical term with a precise meaning and we need to preserve that precise meaning," and at that point I gave in.

Yeah, I agree that it's still at the point where people will look down on you for using it in the colloquial manner.

"Once the classic meaning of a phrase begins losing ground to a less useful but more apparent one, it's time to tell it goodbye." - "beg the question", Roy Blount Jr., _Alphabet Juice_

sounds like the term "cloud computing"

I think you meant,

"this begets the question."

This is something that's been in my head a little while: would there be interest in Wikipedia-style, not-for-profit, in the public interest services? We don't see a lot of this in web stuff - probably because internet has seen a lot of competition and a lot of free stuff. However, maybe there is still demand.

Yes - but contemplate trying to get VC for that. Volunteers only, I suspect.

i can't come up with much in the way of existing not for profit infrastructure institutions. do these exist in some form i can't think of? the closest i can come up with is a rural electrical co-op but i'm not sure that's quite the same thing.

Unless you have a business relationship with whoever you rely upon then you are in trouble. Even then you should be ready to jump ship. Remember when S3 and EC2 went down? If all of those services that rely on it were ready to jump onto another service they wouldn't have gone down as well.

While it's not always possible to replace parts of your infrastructure you rely on, it's common sense to have multiple redundancies for stuff. The problem in the case of Twitter is their offering is users, rather than computing. That's something you can't replace if they pull the plug.

Here is an idea for twitter to make money: User pays a small fee for bandwidth and space the more space (and bandwidth; they will have to figure this out) you need the more you must pay.

One more thing (It is an idea derived for my actual stealth app), you get your own space somewhere to store your tweets. Then they will have to store some sort of repository there for you. Bandwidth and size become your business; you deal with the third party.

This way Twitter will somehow become more open for hackers to do stuff on their platform.

Great to see them announce OAuth support - though I'd prefer a Gmail labs/iPhone app store approach applied to Twitter (Twitter labs).

I really want to customize my Twitter account and if they had Twitter labs I could customize my account accordingly; add features found in these apps directly into my Twitter account. Though instead of Twitter developing new features take iPhone app store approach and approve/integrate developers programs into Twitter. They could then sell each feature and share revenue with developers!

Yeah, because services built on top of another 3rd party product are never successful...

This makes no sense at all. True, your business will fail if the underlying service fails, but Microsoft would fail if all hard drive production suddenly stopped, too. A great many businesses rely on "private 3rd parties". The real concern is "how reliable are they?"

At least they're not reliant on Hitachi et al paying the electricity bills to keep the drives spinning... I'd say that's a rather significant difference.

> Microsoft would fail if all hard drive production suddenly stopped

The likelihood of "all" hard drive (or PC manufacturing) ceasing is a very different proposition than the likelihood of a single, unprofitable company taking an action that puts you out of business.

Most business rely on private 3rd parties, but there is a reason that companies work hard to have multiple sources of supply for critical goods and services.

There are extremes and extremes. I mean, should nobody develop software for the Mac or iPhone platforms? Maybe... but unlike Twitter, Apple is a fairly large and decently stable company which has been around for a while. Then you could look beyond that and say that developing for an Apple platform is still more of a gamble than developing for Windows, but the risk, even decently long-term, of developing for MacOS X, is fairly minimal. Twitter, on the other hand, is a free online service which is only a few years old, and isn't making money. I think where you draw the line in terms of how much risk you're willing to assume due to reliance on other businesses is up to you, but being pedantic doesn't really help.

twitter is like the Internet's syslog to me. ^_^

Is there any reason why the whole publish+subscribe Blogs / RSS complex hasn't settled on a reasonably easy to implement standard similar to SMTP that allows organizations to run their own microblog server?

Its really disgusting to think of twitter (or any single vendor) "owning" this kind of function and preventing simple things like allowing text indexing.

I believe laconi.ca (http://laconi.ca/trac/) provides exactly this kind of functionality. As always, though, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Look at Jabber and how little it has taken away from the proprietary IM protocols. As long as everybody and their mother is on Skype/Twitter/etc. there's not a big incentive to switch.

Yes but there needs to be a protocol not just a competing server.

It seems like the older internet protocol standards like SMTP work better. At least some of this generation of protocols seems to have played out in horrible ways like the IM market where one or at most 4 vendors have walled gardens and an open standard doesn't win. I guess in the early 70s when SMTP was designed there weren't a bunch of big corporations looking to "monetize" every new feature, just some bearded coding gurus in academia who wanted to build something that worked.

There is a protocal. The Open Microblogging Specification. It allows different servers to interact!

There is a protocol. The Open Microblogging Specification. It allows different servers to interact!

I'm wondering the same thing. One of my spare time projects is to design such a protocol (and if for some unforeseen reason I should happen to finish it I'll post it here for all of you to tear to pieces).

Another thing I don't get is when "everyone" claims that Jabber is a Twitter replacement, they're not in the same ballpark feature-wise :P

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