Seth Godin’s blog is a great source of pithy, wise, generous insights. I read pretty much every entry, and often find myself going “Huh! I’d never thought of it that way”. But as usual. I’m only going to blog about him when I disagree.
In a piece written a fortnight ago, Godin writes:
Why is there only one Twitter? One centralized phone network?
A natural monopoly is a business that benefits its users by being the one and only. If there were two incompatible phone networks, you’d need access to both in order to call the people in your life–and remember who was on each network.
That’s true as far as it goes. It certainly explains why there is only one eBay. But if it was a fully general explanation, the inevitable conclusion would be that there would be only one email provider. Thankfully it ain’t so.
Email wins — it’s survived everything that’s been thrown at it for thirty years — because it’s embodied not as a specific service but as a protocol that anyone can implement. I can run my own SMTP server if I want. Heck, I can write my own SMTP server, the specification is freely available. Because of that, no one company can impose a stranglehold. No-one can decide one day that all emails will carry advertisements. If any given email provider does decide that, its users can just move away.
Not so with Twitter, which is why I am ambivalent about it despite its astonishing ability to connect people. (Well, that’s one reason. The other is its astonishing ability to absorb time.) If you want to tweet, and read others’ tweets, then the only place to do that is Twitter (or at best a different UI built on their API). They control the service. And that can’t be good in the long term.
So: is it possible to build a decentralised Twitter-alike, based on a protocol rather than a service? I guess it must be, since tweets are just tiny blog-posts, and the blogging network is nicely decentralised. Pingbacks work between blogs hosted by different providers, for example. And you can make a unified feed of blogs by using their RSS feeds.
In fact, isn’t the infrastructure already there? Isn’t it just RSS? I can read all my friends decentralised tweet-like messages just by watching an RSS feed that merges all their feeds; and I can post my own tweet-like messages as tiny blog-posts which they in turn can see in their own merged RSS feeds.
All it takes is some simple front-end tools for reading and posting. We should make those tools.