It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.

Edit: which is my slightly harsh way of saying dreams are easy, but doing is what counts.

The ecosystem would be a loss leader, simply for the purpose of having lots of market share.

They would make money on their main product.

Same as how google runs all sorts of services without making money on them, simply for the purpose of expanding online usage.

It's basically a variant of the Freemium model.

Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation?

My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties.

My PhD (in progress) is based on the public utility of Twitter data. I'm deeply sad about this.

The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.

As soon as a user has to understand federation - at all - I believe the proposition is dead to most people. For example Diaspora's 'pods' are, I think, fatally confusing. (I think Zuckerberg realised this, which is why he donated money to Diaspora - a project he could see would fail, but might also crowd out other OS alternatives to Facebook.)

For sure, XMPP can be part of the tech solution, in fact I suspect there are really excellent open source tools to address many of the inherent issues (perhaps Apache Cassandra can be Twitter's contribution to democracy) but I think the real problem is a social one.

You need an institution that can credibly promise to provide a platform in the long run and which can also get critical mass in at least one community. I believe the critical mass might well follow if the institution is widely perceived as reliable and legitimate in the way a foundation like Wikimedia is.

I went into some more detail on this in a blogpost: http://jimmytidey.co.uk/blog/building-a-better-twitter/

I don't see why not. Is the problem fundamentally different than SMS messaging or email?

- How would users know which nodes they could trust?

I think email and Sms are pretty weird user experiences that have succeeded in part because there was no alternative.

That is what search engines are for. The whole point of the Internet is that you can build businesses on top of open protocols with interoperable implementations. Giving up on open protocols and control of data (you can't even save images on Instagram...) "because hashtags" is incredibly shortsighted.

Perhaps I was wrong to say that federation is in principle ruled out, but I do think that it must be invisible to users. - Including namespacing usernames to nodes within the federation as with the @ sign in email.

I believe this is true in spite of the technical beauty of federated solutions, and it's exactly that beauty that's lured so many onto the rocks.

Isn't the meme that XMPP is horribly complex and the support for various sub-standards varies hugely?

Which is funny because Facebook Chat also used to be powered by XMPP

Yeah, I was pretty sure that Facebook was just using straight-up XMPP at one point in time. They have been actively trying to drive traffic to their Facebook Messenger app - first by shutting down their XMPP interface, then blocking applications that talk to their web interface, and finally by removing Facebook Messenger functionality from their mobile website.

Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.

[0]http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [1]http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

First was the great apps, and the features that continued to roll out for users. Unfortunately it was under appreciated.

So effectively development stopped in 2014 and it's on maintenance mode since then.

But in terms of having any sort of meaningful discussion on Twitter or the sharing of anything approaching deep thought or analysis, forget it. To me, there is close to nothing of value that can be added by the ordinary individual except perhaps links to other sites.

Personally, I despise Twitter. I do not use it. Never had an account, and never will. I don't know what the future is for the company and the service, but I can only hope that if they are purchased the acquirer does it purely to remove competition from the market and has a celebratory dumpster fire with the servers. If only I was so lucky. Twitter is part of the ego machine that feeds the narcissists that pervade social media.

I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).

Unlike Facebook, where I feel beholden to follow the people I know, Twitter is different. I can follow the thoughts of people I've never met, but greatly respect. There are tons of great designers, writers and journalists that make my Twitter feed entertaining and informative. Not everyone is interested in design or media and it can be difficult to discover accounts.

The other (previous) issue for Twitter is the feed. If you follow 1,000 people it will can be overwhelming. I was hesitant about the "You might have missed" section, but think it is a step in the right direction.

I can follow the thoughts of people without having to see most or all of their thoughts. I can follow people without becoming committed to their antics.

Twitter is the best platform for discussion of a "live" event as it unfolds. These events include TV epidoes, news conferences, policitcal debates, games, etc. A user can see what a famous person thinks or follow other hardcore fans who have great knowledge of what they are watching. I have become friends with several people due to twitter and sports.

Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc are not great for discussing something that is ongoing over the course of multiple hours. Twitter is. The ability to mute words and hashtags to avoid spoilers or certain subjects is super handy. In addition, one can follow multiple live events in a singular, timeline fashion. Twitter is very good at getting people to talk about live events. Its problem is that it is hard to see a place for it outside that, and it is hard to monotize that.

Twitter = people you want to know

The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe?

Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the service. But in reality most of the content is just meaningless noise. It's hard to find any signal on that platform.

It's true that it's a poor platform for adversarial conversation or debate, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole thing.

I've been on Twitter for seven years and in that time I've curated a timeline which is, bar none, the most entertaining and informative web destination available to me, specifically tailored to my interests and disposition.

Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneath. And all using a single Twitter account, so that every subscription to any of their customers' services would be a new account for them.

It could have been a great business model, but their leadership did have the imagination to try anything other than keyword advertising.

It's also good as a breaking news medium.

Even our political campaigns are now reduced to tweet wars, and platforms seem to need to be (lossy) compressed into 140 characters, or maybe 3 if it's very important. If you have a string of longer than 3 tweets, you lose a majority of your audience.

Twitter is a good tool, but simply should not be the de facto anything other than short messaging, in my opinion.

Twitter has expanded the boundaries of politically correct / acceptable speech, by enabling that brown nosing and echo chamber re-enforcement and not cracking down further on what's acceptable speech on their medium.

Twitter is probably the best thing that has happened to low-quality journalism over the past 15 years.

I've always view Twitter as the commerical break and news teasers for the internet. I rarely see good thorough discussions on Twitter especially anything expected to last more than 30 hours of relevance.

This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it.

What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down?

All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not and will never use Twitter.

I think another solution is for the state to force the operator of the social network to keep its APIs open. (It's anti-competitive to do otherwise, would be the argument.)

I think it's interesting that there's a Wiki page about this issue.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...

Good systems for public debate are the precondition for democracy.

In a democracy they are the infrastructure on which all other infrastructure depends. Every subsequent spending decision is influenced by them.

If you turn off public debate nothing will break the next day, but in a decade most people's lives will be misery.

[0] You might claim that Twitter is superior to other forms of public debate, but then I'd ask if you're really happy with the way politics are going.

What's next? A well designed debate platform that allows only emojis? A well designed debate platform that allows only meme pictures?

I am saying that for millions of people Twitter is a unique way to join public debate. Personally, I have interacted with several public individuals who I couldn't conceive of contacting any other way. This is an example of two politics professors taking the time to explain something apparently well known in their circle to me:

https://twitter.com/Jimmytidey/status/757494127537905664

Where else would that happen?

If it does not suit you, fair enough. I find newspapers disinteresting, but I would prefer to live in a society that has them to one that does not. I would also prefer, as with Twitter, that their ownership structure was a little different (I'm in the UK).

I agree that Twitter has design flaws as a medium for public discussion, and I also believe that some of them could be alleviated if Twitter was run was by people with different incentives.

I myself am very happy with the character count, the truth is that the limiting factor is not how long a message you are permitted to write, but how long a message others will be inclined to read. I suspect Twitter is just being honest with us in this regard.

Certainly it is not the place to articulate a nuanced view. It is a place where you can find a unique audience.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/twitters-new-simpler-rules...

"SIMPLE".

New York City's subway system is one example. It started out in the 1900s as a couple of private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT). The lines these two companies operated suffered more and more over time from overcrowding, leading the city to establish a third, public system in the '30s, and then in 1940 to just buy out IRT and BRT and merge all three systems into the single, publicly-operated network that serves NYC today. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... for more on this.)

It can happen, co-operatives are a viable business model. My bank is a co-operative and they work for their member-owners.

I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the digital age.

It's profoundly dubious that Twitter - a defacto 'town square' for public discussion - is owned by an institution that, at best, has few incentives to make it effective for the purpose which it is widely used.

This is significant in democracies, where the quality of national decision making will be directly linked to the design of the channels in which public debate happens.

The idea that we can take full and fair advantage of the opportunities the web offers exclusively through profit-motivated corporations is flatly wrong.

The fact that as Twitter users we agreed to some T&Cs doesn't mean we can't also wish for a more democratic digital public space - which I assume is what the parent comment is really getting at.

I'm told that in Afghanistan it played (plays?) a key role in for aid agencies.

Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.

GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social

That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.

Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.

Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.

I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.

There was just a discussion of a closely related topic a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314

> I think it's still pretty telling

Huh? Telling of what? That you don't have a good grasp on what's going on at Twitter?

I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?

It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded.

It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going.

I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015

[0]https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.

FWIW, I believe GPS costs the US on the order of $1 per user per month.

If you charge per user, it's unaffordable for small developers (unless they push the cost on to their users).

If you charge per app, you won't make enough money for it to be worthwhile.