echovar: A Venezuelan Moment: The Gillmor Gang considers nationalizing Twitter
dave
· 1 year ago
Who wrote this? Great post esp the last paragraph.
Only one problem. As wonderful Twitter is in all the things it means to every person (every one views it differently) it unifies everyone when it disappears -- then it sucks!
Then we're all on the same page --> FIX IT!
I loved the analogy about New York. :-)
Right on.
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
Hi Dave, it's Cliff Gerrish - echovar is my blog, @cgerrish on Twitter. Thanks for the link from Scripting News.
It's an interesting conversation that resonates on many levels. I share your concerns about reliability, although I admire Twitter giving itself the space to fail now and then. 100% uptime is often achieved by locking things down, consolidating product gains and stopping the process of innovation. I think that Twitter is far from what it will eventually become.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
maybe twitter is already everything it will become. maybe it's the dumb social net in the same way that the internet is a dumb network. and because of that amazing things emerge on top of it.
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
Yes, this is similar to Dave's coral reef analogy. I don't consider Twitter separate from the things that emerge from it. This is part of the meaning of rhizomatic. Twitter is a piece, not a whole. It can be a piece of many things and so it is not yet what it will become.
PXLated
· 1 year ago
Thanks...Sums up the Gillmor Gang discussion very well. As well as the issues.
Blaine Cook
· 1 year ago
I have to strongly disagree --- a similar argument could have been made about email ca. 1993, when AOL offered an email service that was qualitatively different than CompuServe, BIX, etc.
The internet isn't a "place"; it's distributed, and it's the individuals who use the internet that create a sense of space themselves --- their desktops, their web browsers, the sites they visit all contribute to their experience.
Moreover, as the person who *built* the track feature (in 12 hours, no less), I'm comfortable saying that you could federate similar services and still retain that functionality. It would be harder for individual services to filter the full global stream without having a potentially significant operational investment, but that's where someone like Google comes in.
crabasa
· 1 year ago
I agree with Blaine. I'm constantly surprised at how over-stated the functionality of Twitter is. When you boil it down to its essentials, I think it's clear that a distributed replica is quite viable.
I've suggested a few times that tracking could be implemented much the way SixApart implemented TrackBack back in the early days of blogging. All micro-blogging tools/sites would implement a commmon API for receiving "follow" pings from their readership.
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
Thanks for the comment Blaine. I wrote the post to try and explain and expose the landscape based on the threads flowing through my info-stream.
I agree that the internet isn't a place in an ordinary sense of that word. But human interaction and history does seem to accrue into specific virtual spaces. Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook are all examples of that. We may be on the verge of a new idea personal virtual space with Marc Canter's Open Mesh, Ray Ozzie's Live Mesh and even the Evernote product.
You've exposed a key point in your comment -- track is filtering the full global stream. As you noted on your comment on GillmorGang site, Twitter makes the full global stream available on an API basis. This takes the conversation beyond replicating pub/sub models for micro-blogging.
Perhaps you could expand on the "significant operational investment" required to filter the full global stream, and why you think a player like Google would be required.
Are you suggesting that the full stream would need to be replicated in real time? (Something like the way UseNet works) Or that queries would need to be joined across multiple full global streams?
Blaine Cook
· 1 year ago
I think both email and the web stand as counter-examples to the idea that localized virtual spaces are somehow more valuable than distributed ones. YouTube is a great example as well --- I suspect a healthy portion of YouTube's views occur off-site, in embedded players.
Regarding the operational investment, it's a matter of scale --- currently Twitter sends on the order of 10 updates per second over the public feed (you can independently verify this; I'm not sure what the actual number is), which requires a tiny investment to handle, doing whatever operations you'd care to do (search, textual analysis, whatever).
However, if we consider the number of blog posts that are made per second around the world, the investment is going to be much higher. Google does a pretty good job of keeping up with blogs, but the crawling, indexing, and notification infrastructure are non-trivial to build and sustain. As micro-blogging becomes larger in scope, a similar problem arises; a vendor providing track-like functionality is going to have to aggregate all the real-time streams, apply filters to identify relevant information, and then send notifications based on matches.
NNTP is a good conceptual representation, except that it's topic-based, rather than user-based.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Blaine
i am with you that federation has significant advantages but neither google nor technorati nor any trackback service does anything close to what twitter does in terms of capturing and facilitating real time discussion.
i run track on my phone (thanks for building that) and i have better discussions ten times a day than i get blog to blog once a month.
fred
Blaine Cook
· 1 year ago
Oh, absolutely; I anxiously await the day that we can apply "track" across, well, the internet. Right now google and technorati et al have no hope to build something like Twitter & track. I hope that federation will open up the web to enabling rich conversations around all sorts of media.
bobwyman
· 1 year ago
Blaine Cook wrote: "NNTP is a good conceptual representation, except that it's topic-based, rather than user-based."
If you just consider each user to be a "topic" then NNTP matches very well. "Following" in Twitter is just topic-based publish/subscribe. Tracking, which is content-based publish/subscribe is the harder challenge -- not implemented commonly by NNTP systems. Based on experience, I can assure you that reasonable systems (i.e. small number of machines) could provide full content-based tracking for tweets at rates of thousands of tweets per second...
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
This is a similar problem to that of real time quotes and the creation of ticker plants to provide "real-time" transaction data to equity traders. There are many vendors in the real-time quote space, but there's only one consolidated tape of transaction data.
Twitter is the consolidated tape. GTalk, or Twhirl when it implements XMPP, will be able to provide track -- as long as Twitter provides follows and track keywords per identity.
This is where there may be a significant difference in the clients -- Twhirl, as a desktop app, may have a problem filtering the full stream. It could certainly filter the follows. Google, and GTalk, would have a better chance of filtering the full tick-by-tick stream on the server side and passing that through to a web-based (or Google Gears) app.
jay
· 1 year ago
How will these suggestions address the issue raised on TWIT recently about the system handling a Britney Spears or Paris Hilton with potentially tens of thousands of followers when it can't seem to support several people like Scoble or Rose or LaPorte who are just busting 5 figures of listeners?
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
This the problem of "Celebrity." Clay Shirky describes it very nicely in his new book. Fame changes a normally two-way communications mode into a broadcast mode. Paris Hilton will write to the steam, but will be unable to read her info-stream because it will be too dense. Just as celebrities can't answer every fan letter. It's likely that another Twitter identity would be created that was protected and distributed to a smaller group.
Robert W. Anderson
· 1 year ago
Good post, Cliff.
I certainly wasn't confused about the RSS part; just that Chris said that the blogging Subscribe/Unsubscribe contract is all we need for a Twitter-like service. I think this is due to his mistaken view that Twitter is just micro-blogging. Wrapping RSS in XMPP may simplify implementation for developers, but architecturally it is neither here not there.
I particularly like your analogies in the last paragraph. Cheers, Robert
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
Hi Robert,
Yes, I could hear that you got what Chris Saad was saying. But Steve, as proxy for the general user, wasn't hearing that piece of it. He was focused on polling versus "real-time" transport of messages.
Check out Blaine Cook's comments here and on the Gillmor Gang blog. Apparently the full real-time stream is available at the API level. Twitter's surprising level of openness continues to tantalize.
Steve Gillmor
· 1 year ago
I got what Chris was saying, and Robert too. Notice that Blaine uses the term "RSS-like" on the show site comment. When someone demonstrates that capability, I'll be glad to start using it. The issue of decentralizing - or federating as Winer suggests today - is separate, and political, not technical in nature as Blaine's Google pitch would suggest. Remember: it's just an opinion I happen to share with Cliff. Office is dead.
Citizen
· 1 year ago
Did anybody thought of Amazon S3 as a solution for the crashes suffered by twitter?
Twitter's always-down problem was quite obviously system administration problem, you just need to read (the attitude of) their ISP migration announcements to tell. It was kinda of like, love-me-love-my-dog mentality. Whoever heading that team should be immediately fired, that's all.
Mike
· 1 year ago
If I fire up a Limewire client I can see this stream of search queries from other people on the P2P network. Couldn't decentralized Twitter servers be using something like that to exchange keywords and implement tracking?
Hamish MacEwan
· 1 year ago
Hi Cliff,
While the graph of tweets (where followers can be followed) is not arborescent, the fundamental structure of twitter is star, with them at the centre and us at the edge.
When decentralising Twitter is discussed, I think IRC. In fact Twitter is a meagre echo of IRC, with a lot of additional limitations but the big plus, for some, of mass mobility thanks to SMS.
Yes its simplicity is its strength, allowing a lot of building on.
Back to IRC, a distributed mesh of servers.
Your call to "Think of a 140 character Tweet as a series of space separated tags to which you can subscribe." is fanciful at best. No-one subscribes to a tweet, but to an end-point, the IP address of Twitter's name space, e.g. cgerrish.
Sure, twitter search (over what subset of tweets) might allow you to subscribe to a "tag" in a tweet, fine, but it hardly defines the fundamental service.
Keep in mind neither the ink nor the paper are the words or ideas. You can't attribute every outcome to its components.
cgerrish
· 1 year ago
Try "Track" using Twitter with an XMPP client. If you have a Gmail acct use Gtalk. iChat also works on the Mac. The client needs to speak Jabber. There are a growing number of people who use track to create an optimal flow of information.
Regarding ink and paper vs. words and ideas -- I suggest looking at Derrida's "Writing and Difference" or "Speech and Phenomena." Writing and thinking are very closely linked.
All Comments
Only one problem. As wonderful Twitter is in all the things it means to every person (every one views it differently) it unifies everyone when it disappears -- then it sucks!
Then we're all on the same page --> FIX IT!
I loved the analogy about New York. :-)
Right on.
It's an interesting conversation that resonates on many levels. I share your concerns about reliability, although I admire Twitter giving itself the space to fail now and then. 100% uptime is often achieved by locking things down, consolidating product gains and stopping the process of innovation. I think that Twitter is far from what it will eventually become.
The internet isn't a "place"; it's distributed, and it's the individuals who use the internet that create a sense of space themselves --- their desktops, their web browsers, the sites they visit all contribute to their experience.
Moreover, as the person who *built* the track feature (in 12 hours, no less), I'm comfortable saying that you could federate similar services and still retain that functionality. It would be harder for individual services to filter the full global stream without having a potentially significant operational investment, but that's where someone like Google comes in.
I've suggested a few times that tracking could be implemented much the way SixApart implemented TrackBack back in the early days of blogging. All micro-blogging tools/sites would implement a commmon API for receiving "follow" pings from their readership.
I agree that the internet isn't a place in an ordinary sense of that word. But human interaction and history does seem to accrue into specific virtual spaces. Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook are all examples of that. We may be on the verge of a new idea personal virtual space with Marc Canter's Open Mesh, Ray Ozzie's Live Mesh and even the Evernote product.
You've exposed a key point in your comment -- track is filtering the full global stream. As you noted on your comment on GillmorGang site, Twitter makes the full global stream available on an API basis. This takes the conversation beyond replicating pub/sub models for micro-blogging.
Perhaps you could expand on the "significant operational investment" required to filter the full global stream, and why you think a player like Google would be required.
Are you suggesting that the full stream would need to be replicated in real time? (Something like the way UseNet works) Or that queries would need to be joined across multiple full global streams?
Regarding the operational investment, it's a matter of scale --- currently Twitter sends on the order of 10 updates per second over the public feed (you can independently verify this; I'm not sure what the actual number is), which requires a tiny investment to handle, doing whatever operations you'd care to do (search, textual analysis, whatever).
However, if we consider the number of blog posts that are made per second around the world, the investment is going to be much higher. Google does a pretty good job of keeping up with blogs, but the crawling, indexing, and notification infrastructure are non-trivial to build and sustain. As micro-blogging becomes larger in scope, a similar problem arises; a vendor providing track-like functionality is going to have to aggregate all the real-time streams, apply filters to identify relevant information, and then send notifications based on matches.
NNTP is a good conceptual representation, except that it's topic-based, rather than user-based.
i am with you that federation has significant advantages but neither google nor technorati nor any trackback service does anything close to what twitter does in terms of capturing and facilitating real time discussion.
i run track on my phone (thanks for building that) and i have better discussions ten times a day than i get blog to blog once a month.
fred
If you just consider each user to be a "topic" then NNTP matches very well. "Following" in Twitter is just topic-based publish/subscribe. Tracking, which is content-based publish/subscribe is the harder challenge -- not implemented commonly by NNTP systems. Based on experience, I can assure you that reasonable systems (i.e. small number of machines) could provide full content-based tracking for tweets at rates of thousands of tweets per second...
Twitter is the consolidated tape. GTalk, or Twhirl when it implements XMPP, will be able to provide track -- as long as Twitter provides follows and track keywords per identity.
This is where there may be a significant difference in the clients -- Twhirl, as a desktop app, may have a problem filtering the full stream. It could certainly filter the follows. Google, and GTalk, would have a better chance of filtering the full tick-by-tick stream on the server side and passing that through to a web-based (or Google Gears) app.
I certainly wasn't confused about the RSS part; just that Chris said that the blogging Subscribe/Unsubscribe contract is all we need for a Twitter-like service. I think this is due to his mistaken view that Twitter is just micro-blogging. Wrapping RSS in XMPP may simplify implementation for developers, but architecturally it is neither here not there.
I particularly like your analogies in the last paragraph.
Cheers,
Robert
Yes, I could hear that you got what Chris Saad was saying. But Steve, as proxy for the general user, wasn't hearing that piece of it. He was focused on polling versus "real-time" transport of messages.
Check out Blaine Cook's comments here and on the Gillmor Gang blog. Apparently the full real-time stream is available at the API level. Twitter's surprising level of openness continues to tantalize.
http://www.gemconsortium.org/about.aspx?page=pu...
cheers,
twitter: jgheller
While the graph of tweets (where followers can be followed) is not arborescent, the fundamental structure of twitter is star, with them at the centre and us at the edge.
When decentralising Twitter is discussed, I think IRC. In fact Twitter is a meagre echo of IRC, with a lot of additional limitations but the big plus, for some, of mass mobility thanks to SMS.
Yes its simplicity is its strength, allowing a lot of building on.
Back to IRC, a distributed mesh of servers.
Your call to "Think of a 140 character Tweet as a series of space separated tags to which you can subscribe." is fanciful at best. No-one subscribes to a tweet, but to an end-point, the IP address of Twitter's name space, e.g. cgerrish.
Sure, twitter search (over what subset of tweets) might allow you to subscribe to a "tag" in a tweet, fine, but it hardly defines the fundamental service.
Keep in mind neither the ink nor the paper are the words or ideas. You can't attribute every outcome to its components.
Regarding ink and paper vs. words and ideas -- I suggest looking at Derrida's "Writing and Difference" or "Speech and Phenomena." Writing and thinking are very closely linked.