If you believe in the power of Twitter, you know it can’t last. | Hacker News Reader

If you believe in the power of Twitter, you know it can’t last.

anassina.com

16 pointsBigCanOfTuna17 comments

By that logic, shouldn't sites like eBay and Craigslist have given way to the e-classified protocol?

Does that mean Hacker News is doomed to be replaced by a generic news aggregation protocol?

I don't think it makes sense to assume everything will be replaced by generic versions. The user base is often worth far more than the protocol/service. I think Twitter is a good example of that.

Needs more substance. I agree with the general premise but saying "twitter is like email as a protocal in the 80's" isn't horribly compelling evidence.

That's what I was going to say. It looks like that the article was put together from 4 or 5 tweets (or whatever they call those short messages).

Perhaps, the article-let is true, but there's just no meat as to why. And I dont understand why a tweet isn't similar to inviting a client on IRC and making short messages via that. All you'd need is a bot to watch who's online and who isnt and have the bot save messages aimed at that user.

The tech is easily here to replace Twitter. And by the times people complain about it going down (fail whale), why not just replace it?

Twitter is just an 'internet' equivalent of SMS. You can predict that eventually all these forms of communication will unify (email/sms/phone/skype) so you won't need multiple phone numbers/addresses/twitter IDs ...

The only thing stopping that is the identity issue. I believe the person that cracks identity will have the ring that rules them all.

Besides the 140 character limitation and the old bridge Twitter had to SMS, what's the similarity? SMS messages aren't public, they aren't searchable, and they don't have "followers" or a social graph.

That's a fair point. I was addressing the premiss of the article that Twitter was a "communications mechanism" like email.

This is actually what Facebook is trying to do with Facebook Connect.

Twitter is a form of microblogging that provides micromessaging capabilities. It doesn't use push technology or XMPP due to technical limitations.

Something like OpenMicroblogging could give way to players that provide push technologies, better long-term search, and are more open with their data (Twitter firehose). Twitter is just the incumbent player in this developing space, and has many high-profile users as MySpace once did.

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

I'd like to see instant messaging somehow better incorporated into Twitter.

XMPP was a core part of Twitter's feature-set from the earliest days. Delivery became a bit (cough) "spotty" in early 2008 or so, and has been turned off AFAIK for a while now. That being said, there's no reason it couldn't be a part of their product offering again, if the obvious security and peer-server throttling issues could be resolved.

OpenMicroBlogging, while an interesting idea in the abstract, suffers from combo of feature bloat (license info per post/link) and missing core items (no baked-in Atom/RSS feed support, no friend/follow listing in profile) that make it far from a "Twitter-killer" out of the box.

Furthermore, the "reference implementation" laconi.ca is a bog-standard PHP/MySQL app. Since many of the complaints about Twitter's dominance stem from frustration with their uptime and scalability, it hardly seems realistic to pin our hopes for a better, more reliable future on a collection of PHP scripts running on a bazillion cheap shared hosting boxen.

In fact, WordPress + P2 (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2) seems like a much more potentially-disruptive technology to me. OMB may be much more carefully designed to preserve security, license terms, and privacy, but we've seen time and time again that normal users don't really care about those things. They want a clean, usable UI, and readily-available documentation and support for a commonly-available product.

Right, if Twitter could get their XMPP features back-in, it would be quite an amazing service. It would work like an IM, real conversations could take place.

The power of Twitter is in it's realtime feed of events (search.twitter.com)

I took this grab during that shooting in Germany:

http://img.skitch.com/20090511-m1uwngda28df3fjreqgqth1rfs.jp...

It's a live feed of citizen reports with a CNN journalist begging for information they intend to filter and relay to viewers.

This democratizes information. You don't have to listen to a corporation's framing/spin of an event. You get the raw facts and make your own judgments. And you get the facts in realtime.

Few people want the raw facts and to have to go through the work of making their own judgments. Even fewer care if it's realtime.

All the article is trying to say is that Twitter, for now, is a "neat trick" to quickly disseminate information to a lot of people. Sounds just like email back in the day, eh? In the future it'll become another communication tool we take for granted, just like email today.

Yes, but the difficult part is missing - how exactly to displace twitter.com website from the "communication mechanism" itself.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a megacorp buy it and sell the rights to use its standard.

i dont know how these linkbait stories get voted up so often =/

If this progression is so inexorable, why hasn't internet instant-messaging given way to a commodity protocol? It has a ~10 year head-start on Twitter.

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