A few days ago, an open source microblog named “Identi.ca” came out of nowhere and suddenly grabbed the attention of many twitter users who are tired of the frequent server outages. People are already starting to say that identi.ca may replace twitter because of its decentralizedness, which is great for scalability.
While it may seem very plausible that the decentralized approach will win over the centralized, you must note that microblogs are quite different from blogs, and this makes all the difference.
Twitter means nothing as a standalone.
Let’s say you are a node in a network of people online. If you’re a blogger, the value of the node–yourself–is very crucial. If you just keep on writing good stuff, you will become famous sooner or later. However microblogs does not allow you to do that. It cannot be meaningful as a standalone because it does not allow you to write a meaningful standalone post. It’s just a communication method. It’s not a media. That’s why many bloggers utilize twitter as a medium to promote their blog posts. You cannot write a twitter post that is valuable on its own. You either need to refer to a post elsewhere or reply to someone else’s twitter. The value is in the “social” network, not the content itself. And twitter owns the network. A robust administration of a network requires a central server, which may be compared to what google is doing to the whole web.
This business is not just a simple messaging business
You may point out that there are actually very successful network architectures that do not take the centralized approach, for example the Internet protocol. You know, Internet itself is decentralized but turned out to be very successful. In fact, it is THE platform on which everything we are talking about here is based.
Now, then how is Internet protocol different from twitter? Internet was designed to send messages. It wasn’t designed to store it somewhere for later usage. On the other hand, twitter is not just a communication method. Each post is saved in the centralized twitter server so that it can be accessed later. Again, the value is in the network.
Identi.ca or its likes will just grow the twitter pie
So, it is possible that tools such as Identi.ca will gain traction and many people switch from twitter to identi.ca. This will not hurt twitter. In fact I don’t think twitter will be foolish enough to let that happen. Instead they may opensource itself just like identi.ca and store only the important administrative data on
its server so that it can still have control over its users.
Conclusion
Twitter is the telecommunications company of the web2 era. identi.ca or anything like them will eventually play the role of phones which operate over the twitter telecom network. This is how I see it. What will happen? We shall see.
