Well worth reading the whole thing. It’s not too long, and he’s already Readability’d it for us, if you will.<p>But if you don’t have time:<p>• #NewTwitter will make Twitter more mainstream, and will provide advertisement opportunities.<p>• #NewTwitter is a shift away from being a platform towards being a destination (or “place of consumption,” if you will), and as such further complicates relationships with third-party developers.<p>• Twitter should become decentralized, but it’s clearly in Twitter’s best interested not to.<p>• Alex circulated a document internally advocating decentralization, and executives disagreed (understandably).
Ultimately Twitter is a business that needs to generate ROI for its investors.<p>The open API gave them plenty of ideas for functionality and "holes" in their system, and Twitter has made it clear that they need to fill those holes.<p>The multiple points of entry also showed them that they needed a seamless user experience, which is why they launched their own native Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, launched an iPad app and now relaunched their web interface.<p>Many of the twitter.com upgrades were built by someone else on some other site first, but it is in Twitter's own interest to use those ideas to get more traffic to twitter.com and ultimately use the traffic to generate revenue.<p>It is sad to think that Twitter fostered its ecosystem only to strong arm it and chop it down when it was ready to figure out its monetization strategy. But those are the perils of building a business off of someone else's platform.<p>As a Twitter application developer myself I knew this was a risk, but I have become painfully aware of it over the past few months. I think their current trajectory will eventually kill off a good part of the ecosystem that helped them get to this point.
His comments on the difference between Twitter and Facebook are particularly interesting:<p>"Previously, developers took data out of Twitter and into the context of their own applications and services. The new design flips this on its head, bringing rich embedded content into the site from a host of brand-name web properties. (It’s worth noting that Facebook has done much the opposite: they started out with a very centralized build-it-within-our-walls model, then gradually grew their tendrils out into the web with Facebook Connect.)"<p>I'm curious how this relates to his later observation that "walled gardens" are doomed to fail. In both instances, the walls are being chipped away, but in the former, the content is being brought in, while in the latter, content is being let out.
This is a nice piece, and makes some very good points.<p>Completely unrelated: I enjoy reading Alex's writing in the same way I enjoy reading John Gruber and Paul Graham. He's eloquent, thoughtful, and passionate.
Disclaimer: I never "got" really Twitter. The service still strikes me as mostly useless.<p>Now this could just be me but he says:<p>"Twitter needs to decentralize [...] my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down."<p>So I heard we had this decentralized way of sharing which they call "the web" which is completely decentralized and without walled gardens. And we had these technologies called RSS and ATOM for receiving updates on those.<p>So...he's effectively suggesting we go back to the web and RSS but with everyone writing shorter messages?
Is it just me but isn't it a bit too early to say Twitter is trying to wall itself in? Are they taking down the APIs?<p>From what I can see here they just want Twitter.com to be a viable (and profitable) business. Why wouldn't anyone want that? In fact, I think it's about time Twitter finally stepped up to define just what kind of a service Twitter really is about. If anything it would be a nice stepping stone to introduce to people who don't yet get it's structure to try it out.<p>Yes, there are third-party developers who have created their own platforms and in a sense helped define the medium. There are many such choices, but really many of the functions they provide overlap. Do we really need that many different Twitter clients with minute differences? If Twitter were to provide the basic functions itself, then I'd say that this is a good time for third-party developers to think up new ways to diversify themselves. Wasn't there just not so long ago someone posted a HTML5 tower defense game up here that has a Twitter scoreboard? Why not expand on that?
It's an interesting question, one that Twitter is at the center of now but one that's not limited to Twitter: Where do we draw the line between a technology company and the culture its technology has spawned?
Nail on head for me:<p>". . . Twitter Platform primarily serves Twitter’s interests, in stark contrast to the era of API growth . . ."<p>and his rueful close in "I believe that Twitter as a medium is and should be distinct from Twitter as a business."<p>Twitter got to where they are based on open standards, dev empowerment, etc.<p>Thanks to their money in the bank and lack of need for a biz model they had ample time to own it, be the standard, become the medium - what is a Twitter exactly if not a Twitter?<p>Going to be very interesting to see where this next step takes them.
Twitter.com is not a protocol, it is a service. I think it is also important to note that it isn't a public utility either.
right now it is dangerous to place all your eggs in a single basket. When you only have one service provider you lose control of things such as dependability, namespace, access, etc. These are things that most may be willing to let someone else provide for them, but some may want to control these and other aspects of microblogging. A federated design with multiple independent service providers would go a long way to help fix these shortcomings.
Can Twitter or Facebook become a Medium? In response to Alex Payne:
<a href="http://benatlas.com/2010/09/can-twitter-or-facebook-become-a-medium/" rel="nofollow">http://benatlas.com/2010/09/can-twitter-or-facebook-become-a...</a>