Twitter Boycott? Meh.
Paul Chaney thinks we should all boycott Twitter tomorrow on the 4th of July.
But, I don’t really think this will do anything about the real CORE ISSUE with twitter reliability: Scalability of a push framework around self-forming groups. It has to do with the number of processes needed to send one message to someone with, say 20 followers:
- Who are each of the followers?
- For each follower, are they listening?
- If they are listening, how do they want updates?
- If they want updates, send the update to them.
- Make sure, if they ever come online, this message gets shown in their personal timeline… in the right order.
- Make sure, if an API ever requests this user’s messages that this one is included in the reply.
- Check to see if this tweet was a reply to someone/anyone.
- For each person it was a reply to, repeat steps 2-6 to send each of them the reply.
- … but don’t send them the reply if we already sent it!
- For. each. word. in. the. tweet, see if anybody on the entire earth was tracking that word.
- Repeat steps 1-6 and 9 for each of those people.
- Get ready for the very next tweet, since you’ve had so much downtime
More than all of that tech-speak, twitter is just cooler than the others:
- Identi.ca doesn’t allow SMS yet. Fail.
- Brightkite isn’t universally accessible (and kinda serves another purpose). Fail.
- Jaiku can’t be pronounced in English. Fail.
End of the day, I think my friend Matt Reinbold said it best amid the furor and uproar (on twitter, of course) about identi.ca’s launch yesterday:
“I am wearied by the supposed “twitter-killers” that have no mobile support. the any-input/any-output beyond-a-browser IS the killer feature.”
The twitter-wanna-bes will come and go, but none of them will match twitter because:
- There’s ANY interface: web, mobile web, widgets, IM, SMS, API, RSS–you name it.
- Its wicked easy to start and just “go”
- When you’re changing locations, because of the ubiquity of access, the conversation follows you–from web/app to IM to SMS and back again.
- Its simple to learn/execute commands, like DM, add/remove/block, etc.
- Other apps can be built on top of it, like, easy.
- The people I want to talk to are already there (I already went through the rough days on twitter what back when @jasonalba was the only other person on the network. I don’t want to do that all over again!
So, boycott twitter if you want. Or not.
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