Most of my time these days is spent crossing the blood-brain barrier between Twitter and the rest of the cloud. Twitter stands on one side, a coursing stream of social data emanating from an ad-hoc framework of asynchronous follows and vanity track filtering. On the other side, the legacy blogosphere, RSS items floated via Google Reader shared items and planted in the Twitter stream via TinyURLs.
Managing the transfer of data across the barrier are two applications. One (FriendFeed) is disguised as a social media aggregator, and the other (Twhirl) is disguised as a rich internet application extension of Twitter that allows multiple users, point-and-click UI enhancements of the vanilla Twitter feed, and, common to all third-party apps, a licensing limitation on polling the Twitter API.
On Tuesday, Twitter suffered its first substantial test since the 3-or-so day outage several weeks ago, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries where Barack Obama essentially sealed the nomination of the Democratic Party. As the polls closed and traffic spiked, the Twitter real time gateway through IM and SMS collapsed, leaving those of us who live on that transport high and dry. within minutes, we switched over to Twhirl, which slowly but more quickly came back online than the gateway through, in my case, Gmail’s Gchat.
For the next several hours, I ping-ponged back and forth between the two services, Gchat arrayed on the left of the screen in a vertical browser window, and Twhirl in its AIR container hovering above the right of the screen and notifications rolling up from the bottom of my MacBook AIR as they were received from API requests. The Gchat gateway went up and down, alternating between no service and old tweets paging in as the database of outstanding tweets was flushed, until sometime after 7PM Pacific they synchronized just about the time Obama gave his victory speech.
The outage illustrated one more time (as if it were not obvious already) the need for a scalable and reliable Twitter, or at least one third party service that also provides the gateway functionality: Real time conversations between discoverable endpoints not necessarily aware of each other until the swarming characteristics of an event, an idea, a personality, an affinity group, or any combination of these elements are enabled. Twhirl’s Loic Le Meur announced such features on the May 2nd edition of The Gillmor Gang.
Friendfeed will likely follow suit, but it raises more questions than it answers with its expanded comment infrastructure and extended harvesting of non-Twitter streams such as delicious and blogs. Robert Scoble has used Friendfeed and its Hide function as a refuge from too much noise on Twitter answering his 20k followers, but only when Twitter implements track filtering will mass following cease to be a feature driver.
Less solvable are the tactical feints by startups that masquerade as standards-based solutions to the so-called centralization problem. Gillmor Gangs on Thursday and Friday delved into the mysteries of decentralization, but I remain unconvinced that these strategies do little more than shift the controlling authority for the Twitter namespace to other potential landlords. First, it won’t happen as long as Twitter executives maintain open XMPP access to third parties, and provide timely and responsive solutions to track spam and predictive scalability for event thresholds during the next few months.
Second, a careful reading of tech politics suggests the takeover of Twitter is an unlikely occurrence given the weakness of second tier players like Yahoo and Sun and the strengths of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo looks like Hillary’s shadow campaign as it walks through the motions of building out a social media personalization strategy while Microsoft’s Mesh infrastructure obsoletes the portal logic it’s based on. Sun is courting social media superdelegates while IBM is piling up the popular vote with customers in the midmarket. In both cases, the numbers are brutal in their inevitability. Scott McNealy should engineer a merger of the two weaklings and give Jonathan Schwartz some tools to survive, matching Yahoo users with Sun/Amazon clusters.
But even that unlikely mating would be swift meat for Microsoft, who is all over why Twitter is fundamental to the next phase of the enterprise network. No matter who owns the pipes, the real struggle is to deliver the drugs across the blood brain barrier. Mesh abstracts out the hardware layer at a deeper level than Amazon or Solaris with its virtualization layer — down at the social layer where the users live and control the domain. It’s the users, stupid, as Carville famously put it. Once switching costs are controllable, the user can band together in affinity groups and mandate the price vendors will need to pay to be listened to.
At its simplest (its true power) Twitter is a phone switch for routing information flow. Those who control the flow control the price for the information. In a virtualized platform, the hardware is the razor and the software switch is the blades. The software switch is an affinity-based construct that manages the signal-to-noise ratio of the information flow based on the contouring signals (gestures) of the members of the group. In the language of Twitter, it’s who you follow times what you track divided by how you filter.
The trick is squeezing the firehose down into multiplexed channels across the blood brain barrier and then expanding them as they flood the brain and its synaptic map. The architecture of swarms has unique characteristics that we are seeing modeled in the contortions of Friendfeed, Facebook Connect, Ustream chatrooms, Google Reader Notes, Disqus, and the rest of what Marc Canter calls the open mesh. It goes beyond bootstrapping, harnessing the brain’s ability to add the gut instinct of survivability to the equation of what choices can be made about information triage.
Simply put, you have to have the ability to broadcast an acuity for successful guesses. We’re at the doorway of gesture farming, where individual gesturers go beyond implicit behavior harvesting and aggregation and overtly share not just what they like but what they ignore. We’re seeing this in the political realm, where people are tuning out repetitive and shrill networks built on track spamming (Reverend Wright, Day One, electability) and tuning in to credible authentic sources regardless of media affiliation. They’re going direct via TinyUrl and their social graph (follow/track/filter) ontology.
Those who laugh at Twitter and trivialize it are insulting the very users they want to engage with. In elections, that is a fatal mistake. In technology acquisition and adoption, it is similarly Darwinian. Ballmer’s buh-bye is still being discounted as posturing, but in a real-time conversation, once you’ve met the mettle of the (wo)man, you know what you need to know. I think Ballmer and Gates and Ozzie had already made the calculation before they made the offer, namely that they were looking for a partnership with Yahoo’s users and developers, not with its executives. That is not to say they were not valuable, just that they would have to prove their value in the conversation. They didn’t. The rest is still in play.
Decentralizing Twitter is unnecessary, if not impractical. Dave Winer was right the first time, when he intuitively grasped the power of Twitter was not in what it was designed to be but in what it could be used for. By building on top of it, Winer signaled that instinct that he marshaled into RSS, the gesture of respect, the idea that in Steve Stills’ words, “Somethings happening here, What it is ain’t exactly clear…” Twitter ain’t broke, and we don’t need to fix it.
First!
another entity flooding Gillmor’s brain barrier in great clouds: cannabinoids.
this is lazy, badly-written undergraduate nonsense
Twitter ain’t broke, and we don’t need to fix it. Amen,
“Simply put” – Hardly
This one gets it on all fronts, including the area between the sub arachnoid space and the intraoccular region.
thanks, excellent.
Google: a snapshot (click below)
http://neoviky....everything.html
Vikram
Twitter has changed the way I communicate and absorb content on the web. With only 140 characters it forces people to be precise and to the point. It doesn’t allow for the excess baggage that can come with an article, blog post, or forum discussion. I can choose who to follow providing me with content I want not what is forced upon me. Twitter is going to change everything we have ever known about the web. Let the revolution begin!
Twitter is like an ink-blot – people use it for very different reasons. In ten (or one) years, there will be something else.
blah blah blah. 1) too many words 2) you and arrington need to get off of the twitter ego stroke crack.
This is insane.
I’m sorry, but
What?
I listened to both shows about this, and would like to understand more about the alternative transport mechanism for RSS that Chris Saad was describing. It never occurred to me that the format does not necessarily have to be bound up with polling.
Bring back Duncan!
AFAIC, If twitter doesn’t aqcuire something like Vonage’s new Visual Voicemail
http://www.vona...isual_voicemail
Then it’s absolutely useless. I would rather drive in traffic then have to text a message, and it’s the same with a lot of people that aren’t teeny boppers.
A lot of people will sign up for the service and never use it again.
So I don’t relate to the article stating that Twitter is the center of your universe and that all other services should be peripherals. I think that’s dumb.
Ok, who seriously gives a flying fuck about Twitter? It’s for 12 year old girls who like to text message each other.
I’m so sick of these blogs that just talk endlessly about this bullshit thing that no one I know would ever touch.
No one cares… shut the hell up about Twitter and all related products. You’re the only ones addicted to this SHIT! All these Shitter-related posts have made me read TechCrunch less often, because fully 30% of the items are a guy masturbating about how there’s a new feedreader for his Twitter account.
Stop fucking talking about it.
Good God Man, get a life!!!
“I’m so sick of these blogs that just talk endlessly about this bullshit thing that no one I know would ever touch.”
Scoble, Arrington, ect… They’re all either
A. Direct investors
B. Good friends of the investors
C. Good friends of the board
Why do you think Seesmic, Twitter, et al keep popping up on the top Technorati blogs while 100s of similar services that exist are never covered at all?
Real journalists are held accountable for being impartial but on the internet that is conveniently swept away.
@#10… your comment had too many words, douche sauce.
Great write-up, as usual, Steve. I would like to point out how Scoble has not eaten his own dogfood… he likes to talk/brag about how many feeds he subscribes to and how many Twitter followers he has but at the end of the day he “loves FriendFeed”… why? because it allows him to filter out a ton of the garbage he has brought down upon himself!! It’s asinine almost to the point of insulting. The man could no longer keep up with the massive influx of data he requested so he now scuffles off to the next service because it let’s him “keep” his prior cruft without actually having to be reminded of how much content he has missed out on! It’s a matter of :
“I can say ‘look at all the people I follow, look at my OPML and see all those feeds I follow’ but because I am at FriendFeed all the time I don’t actually have to feel obligated to consume a fraction of a percent of the content I’ve asked for.” – My Take On Scoble’s True Method.
So there is that dynamic to consider: How many people abuse the amount of people they follow so they can look like a big time listener but then use a 3rd party tool to just trim it all away and only read what they want from who they want? Twitter is left carrying a major load for no reason… all so people like Robert Scoble can “appear” to be more interested in “listening” than “broadcasting”. That, to me, is a sliver of B.S. I respect Robert Scoble a great deal but I’m starting to see through his shady act a little bit, at least as far as his whole “the value is in who you follow” routine. FriendFeed enables people to drift away… it’s being billed as a way to interact and immerse one’s self in new content but the reality is it’s just an excuse to ignore more opinion than you can with direct services (like Twhirl, Twitter proper, Google Reader, etc.) … (As in never even have to see or keep track of. [no: "43 unread items..." etc.])
P.S. In what world are Twhirl and FriendFeed in some kind of contest? (last I hear, Twhirl was integrating FriendFeed) lol… so nice try but Twhirl is simply not a contender for Web-Application du-jour… it is an API tapping AIR application… I’m still baffled as to why Loic (I mean “Seesmic”) bought it in the first place… such a shitty piece of software… (AlertThingy is a little bit better… I use AT as I had nothing but problems with Twhirl…) oh well. It’s neat and all… but an acquisition target?? Who was doing a favor for who?
Perhaps the worst TechCrunch post ever.
Ever.
Gillmor’s real message (in all this wordfluff) is his compulsive obsession with Obama.
Other than that, his article is, to use one of his favorite words, bullshit. He’d do a lot better to stick with his favorite app’s format of 140 characters.
Dude you know nothing about what the Blood Brain Barrier is. This is a terrible article and a terrible analogy as a title. Please grow a brain.
For your next critical theory draft I’d like to request a proof that the law of gravity doesn’t exist.
TOO much Facebook and Twitter on TC these days.
Steve please get out of the Twitter syndrome.
Mike you should stop ranting a lot about FB, seriously.
@19: no one read your comment – too long. maybe you should twitter about it.
the worst post ever!!!
This reminds me of the first essay students hand in when they arrive at university. The tutor then proceeds to criticise the hell out of it.
Ironically, this particular post has an onomatopoeic ring to it – the content within the post is about as organised as the content being described.
http://tinyurl.com/6nhawg
Twitter is useful in many ways but totally unreliable as a serious service so how can you argue that it doesn’t need to be fixed. The actual service is a joke and someone needs to build a better mousetrap, fast.
“Now, we know that their end game is to sell the platform for a lot of money. And eventually it will end up in the hands of one of these big cos.”
@29,
There are tons of SMS based services available. You can even cobble your own with some cheap software
http://www.tech...ur-own-twitter/
and
clickatell.com/pricing/message_cost.php
So why Twitter?
We the readers want to know what the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon are that make Scoble et al push this and facebook repeatedly. What is your percentage of the IPO/sellout/exit plan?
We want to know why? Why these services are pushed so hard?
To an outsider, even in California, it hardly makes any sense.
We know why the largely unused and cathartic Seesmic button is below the submit comment button here(Arrington investment corp), but why the others?
Enlighten us, oh Steve Gillmore.
#31
Of all the bullshit thrown here, the notion there is conflict of interest here is right at the top of the list. I ‘push this service so hard” because I think it is the single most important development on my screen in a very long time, oh, since the advent of RSS, which by the way, experienced the same Twittorrent of crap you guys are throwing at this. By the way, on that last Gillmor Gang, Doc Searls coined the term Twittorrent, and then IMed me to grab it, which I did. So here’s your conflict of interest right here, pal.
Twittorrent. I just puked in my mouth.
Sad that people can distinguish between intellect and noise. Steve isn’t noise.
Keith
@32, I don’t believe that this is all attributed to viral marketing amongst the blogging elite. Not any more than I believed MySpace’s girl of the week TM was on G4TV just because they thought MySpace was so useful for it’s viewers as they claimed.
It’s not hard to market to trusting people from non-US countries and have them take things verbatim with no checks.
Somebody could come on here and think the Seesmic button is there because Seesmic really is that much better than any of the 10,000 other flash video server startups.
I know that there is pooled money/interest here. You can tell that just by having following you’re “gang”’s blogs for the past couple years.
that should read “having followed your “gang”". Sorry for the grammatical error. I am coding in Eclipse in another window.
Is that a TechCrunch logo on Fonzie’s bike that just flashed before my eyes?
My, how the late Sunday afternoon sun glints off the roiling tank.
blah blah blah, what a poorly thought out and unstructured random monologue on such a lightweight topic.
What about engaging the brain and thinking through and editing your posts before you publish them?
Dear God.
tldr
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter…. I think you should rename this blog to TwitterCrunch!
All that verbosity and symbolism and the payoff is a Buffalo Springfield line?
Fuck off
yahoo pipe to filter this http://pipes.ya...f3RGSveSj9YS63A
Arrington, if you’re going to publish Gillmor on here, would you do us all a favor: confiscate his thesaurus, and maybe install some kind of “half-baked metaphor” filter?
I’d already listed to both GG podcasts on this topic, and I do think this is an interesting conversation, but as far as this post goes I simply can’t figure out what the hell Gillmor is (or thinks he is) talking about.
@41 man thats a low blow..but if the show fits. It almost seems as if there are so many startups you can write about that is genuine. Techcrunch knows this so they start writing about things that might get there pockets fat before the money runs out.
>A. Direct investors
>B. Good friends of the investors
>C. Good friends of the board
I am never a direct investor in anything I cover. Good friends of the investors? Nope. They don’t invite me over for beer or dinner. Good friends of the board? I couldn’t even tell you who is on the board of Twitter or FriendFeed.
Maybe the reason I talk about these things so much? Because I watch early adopter behavior and early adopters have adopted these in HUGE numbers. I have 22,000 followers on Twitter. 8,000 on FriendFeed, 7500 on Facebook.
I’ll cover ANY service that gets these kinds of numbers of early adopters.
Plus, explain how I covered Qik before anyone else? I was the first user and had no clue who anyone on the team was. A friend of Qik showed it to me in an Apple store.
I’ve covered TONS of things. I was the first to talk about Cocomment, for instance. I saw that for the first time in Switzerland. You might go to http://www.fastcompany.tv and see what we’re covering right now (a company from Tel Aviv, Israel).
>We want to know why? Why these services are pushed so hard?
> To an outsider, even in California, it hardly makes any sense.
Twitter is the only service that has HUGE numbers of early adopters on it. That’s what keeps me there, and why it stays interesting to me.
Some things that appealed to me about Twitter:
1. Simple interface. 140 characters. No graphics. No video. Makes it easy to skip through tons of noise (sorta like how it’s easy to skip over the jerks in this comment thread).
2. Each post has its own URL. Makes it different than chat or IM.
3. You can push posts into, and pull them out of, Twitter in a number of different ways. XMPP for using Google Talk, for instance. API for using Twhirl, for instance. SMS for using your cell phone, for instance. Or just plain old Web page.
4. You can mashup Twitter messages in any number of different ways. http://www.twittervision.com puts the messages on top of a Google Map. http://www.tweetscan.com lets you search for things in all Twitter messages, for instance.
5. Twitter is the feeding system for a whole range of new kinds of apps like FriendFeed (my favorite), Profilactic, Facebook, SocialThing, and others.
6. There are competitors, like Jaiku and Pownce, but they never got the community support that Twitter did.
Twitter IS the winner here. Anyone who says it isn’t isn’t paying attention.
As for why TechCrunch is “TwitterCrunch” lately. It’s easy. Everytime I write about Twitter on my blog I get 10x more traffic than if I write about, say, Microsoft buying Yahoo. I’m sure Mike Arrington is noticing the same thing in his logs. Heck, many of the things he writes about don’t get 50 comments on a Sunday afternoon. So, you only have yourself to blame. You’re more interested in Twitter than other topics and Arrington is just serving the readership demand.