I’ve been using the mini-blog/messaging app Twitter a lot lately. You could say I’m addicted. I’ve also noticed that while Twitter has had problems in the past few weeks, lots of folks are checking out competitors like Plurk. I’m not a super-techie so maybe I’m missing this, but I want to know when someone is going to come up with a non-exclusive standard for the thing we do that I call Twittering.
Meaning, a bunch of years ago Blogger.com was one of the main blogging tools in town, but they weren’t the only one in town. You could still blog without them and read blogs without them. The medium triumphed, not necessarily the Blogger brand (and I imagine a lot of the usability of the blog brand has to do with RSS, yet another standard).
I want to see the same thing happen with Twitter. I want the medium to triumph, not just Twitter or Plurk or whoever. I don’t have time to reinvest in a new platform every so many months and it seems stupid to spread users of this medium across multiple platforms. I should be able to get messages from all my friends regardless of their system (hmm, kind of like cell phones). I’m not sure when, if or how that’s going to happen, but I hope it does.
Excellent points!
One of the troubles of distributing a Twitter-like system is that immediacy is one of the primary strengths of such a system. If it becomes an open standard like email’s IMAP, wherein you have clusters of users surrounding different domain names, you also introduce a lot of latency into the equation.
Although you’d probably have more uptime too. ;-) Plus, the messages are so short, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to keep the latency low.
This is a very intriguing problem. For someone else to solve.