PerthNorg

The Future of Microblogging

Despite its rapid growth and popularity, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that twitter  is unlikely to survive, at least in its current form. This is partly because they will struggle to build a business model to start paying off their venture capital backers. But more importantly, it is because twitter is a closed system and that will ultimately constrain its potential.

Twitter's current estimated user base of around 2 million is still well short of the size required to generate adequate returns on the capital invested in the company so far. The recent blog post  Why Twitter will be Sold in a Fire Sale estimates that $20 million has been invested in twitter to date but, even by tapping into a wide range of revenue generating alternatives, the most they could hope to generate from their current user base is around $17 million. So they need a lot more users, and yet their growth rate appears to have slowed of late* and the frequent performance problems the site experienced in July this year cast doubt on their ability to cope with much more growth. The fact that twitter recently had to pull its international SMS service is an indication that financial considerations are starting to bite.

However, the real problem with twitter is that it is a walled garden. The current microblogging environment is like the early days of email. If you were a Compuserve user, you could send messages to other Compuserve users, but not to people on other networks. It was only once email was able to work across different networks that it was able to start realising its potential and become so entrenched in our online lives.

If you are a twitter user, your messages are not visible to pownce, twitter or jaiku users. Again the demand for cross-platform messaging is there and this demand has been partially met by sites like Ping, which allows you to post to multiple microblogs and FriendFeed which can receive updates from multiple platforms. However, the real answer lies in following the email example and developing an open protocol for microblogging. Luckily, that has started to emerge in the form of Evan Prodromou’s OpenMicroBlogging specification, which he has implemented in the open-source Laconica application. Just like an email server, Laconica can be installed anywhere to create a local microblog, but users on the local system can also connect to other microblogs that implement the OpenMicroBlogging protocol. This works in much the same way that you can send email not just to colleagues in your own firm, but to anyone anywhere in the world with an email address. Evan uses the phrase “federated servers” to describe this approach. It is still very early days for Laconica, which was only released a few months ago, but it is already gaining momentum. So far the biggest installation is Evan’s own identi.ca site, which picked up quite a few twitter users in July when twitter was experiencing repeated outages. Like many others who stumbled upon identi.ca at the time, I intially thought it was just a twitter clone with fewer feaures (back in July it didn’t even support replies). But not only did Laconica (and hence identi.ca) start adding features at a furious rate, but I started to appreciate the advantages that the federated approach brings.

[Edited Extract of a Stubborn Mule blog post]