I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and thanks to Techcrunch, I’ve finally got my excuse. TC describes a scheme for making Twitter “portable”, with a goal of solving the service’s technical problems. According to the post, if you glue enough “standards” together, a Twitter-killing Phoenix just might rise from the ashes, and service outages will be a thing of the past.
Part I: Economies of Cooperation
As someone who spent almost seven years working in open source, I’m the last person who will argue against openness, but there are a few things wrong with TC’s notion. Most important, “open standards” have to work in cooperation with business, not in fierce competition. As anyone who has worked in the industry knows, free software is anything but free. Both the cathedral and the bazaar have extensive present and built-in costs.
So what does this have to do with Twitter? The idea of the “open Twitter killer” is built on an open service model. Open services are the Web 2.0 version of open source software. Just like open source software, open services have built-in and present costs: hardware, data centers, staff and developers. Because open services are standards-based, there is implied future-protection justifying the provisioning costs. Putting it more bluntly, open services can’t exist without business, especially at Twitter-scale.
When the founder of DataPortability.org publicly brainstorms ways to kill Twitter on Techcrunch, he’s taking the movement backwards. Anyone with engineering skill can dream up a way to “open” a service; the real challenge is bringing companies in to the fold to support open services. Talking about how to kill them is not a good way to do this.
Part II: Interaction and Next-Gen Social Networks
This brings us to our second point: does an open Twitter work? Even if some large companies stepped up to support the cost of an open Twitter, one that never suffered downtime, would we migrate to it? Barring a complete failure by Twitter, the answer is an obvious no. Why? While the DataPortability folks and TechCrunch think Twitter is just a messaging service, the other 99.9 percent of us see Twitter for what it is – a social network service.
I’ve always had a big-tent approach when it comes to social networks; a social network is something you feel, rather than something born from a set of features. Twitter only marginally stands up to the boyd/Ellison definition: Is Twitter bound? Does a 140-character bio really count as a profile? I believe that Twitter forces us to rethink some of the assumptions around social networks. Here’s how Twitter pushes thinking on the subject forward:
- Message-centricity, as opposed to Profile-centricity: The core of any social network is messaging/communication, as illustrated by Dunbar in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. In profile-centric social networks (Myspace, Facebook), messaging has largely taken place through the profile (I talk through my profile, you respond through my wall/apps/etc.). By locating the network around the profile, we were really locating it around “communication”. In Twitter, the “profile” is our communication, an always-on, interactive wall.
- Imagined Identity: In focusing on interaction and communication, Twitter has eliminated many of the social network profile elements that make people uncomfortable. In Twitter, you’re not expected to list your favorite movies and upload lots of pictures (which, to many late 20′s and 30′s users feels like online dating). Rather, your identity is imagined – constructed through your communication and relation to your followers. For those who aren’t in social network expansion, the imagined identity (as exposed to the explicit identity of dating sites/Facebook) is much more comfortable.
- Close Community: I’ve often described Twitter as a “close” community. While outlying bloggers have thousands of followers, most of us are followed by far less than 100 people (not including spambots). The knowledge of one’s disclosure community in a social network makes interaction more personal. A close community prevents some of the context leakages of monolith social networks; of course, Twitter needs a better approach to scale close community forward.
- Constant Flux: The previous three elements – message centricity, imagined identity, and close community – interact to create a constant state of flux in Twitter. This is Twitter’s killer feature. For those who use Twitter in a close network, you constantly renegotiate your friends’ “profiles” throughout the day. As your concept of a “profile” is your friend’s last few posts, each new post is new information. This is why you keep checking Twitter throughout the day – people you care about are updating, communicating, and sharing.
Twitter isn’t a platform, it is a unique social network. It is a social network stripped to its most essential elements. Twitter provides social network designers a roadmap forward, a way of thinking about social networks more fundamentally. An “open” clone offers very little by way of competition. Further, an open clone that lacks the design or interaction aspects of Twitter would actually feel very different. Twitter is really about the user experience – something that simply can’t be replicated via an open standard.
