Never have I gone from loving to loathing a service so much as I have done with Twitter over the past twelve to eighteen months. As one of the early adopters who has seen it rise from its first SXSW in 2007 to where it is today with 148 million tweets daily.
Twitter’s transition over the past twelve months from a fledgling startup just trying to pay the bills and tackle the juggernaut that is Facebook to Sith Lord who tells many of the third-party developers1 to pound sand.
Brent Simmons asks what the alternative to Twitter is:
It’s self-evident, I hope, that the best alternative to Twitter would be, like the web itself, not owned by a vendor.
It would be decentralized – there would be no single point of failure (no one big fail whale) and no single concentration of power. Again, like the web itself.
The solution to this is obvious: your own blog. Think about it.
- You can have a hosted blog on a variety of platforms such as Wordpress, Squarespace or TypePad.
- You have the option of hosting it yourself much like I am with this fine site.
- There’s great search offered via Google or Bing.
- It’s free and easily accessible to anyone.
Where blogging fails and Twitter succeeds is in the effort category. In the time I took to fire up MarsEdit and write this post, I could have posted a snarky 140 character version to Twitter and then gone to make a sandwich. Twitter’s greatest asset is its limitations.
It’s other greatest asset is the community aspect. As soon as I post a tweet on Twitter, I will instantly see anywhere from zero to dozens of replies to that specific tweet show up and can continue the conversation right there. With blogging, I am forced to have comments2 or the archaic functionality known as trackbacks.
Comments are inferior to tweet replies because they are hosted on my personal site rather than the commenter’s. Much like my Twitter stream, I want to have total control over every single word that is read on carpeaqua.com.3 When I retweet a tweet from someone else it is because I want to share it with my followers. More often than not, Internet commenters submit things I do not want to be associated with my writings, yet there they are hanging just below it.
Rather than putting any effort into finding or funding a decentralized Twitter alternative for the ubergeeks who have had their heart broken by a company whose VCs have finally decided it is time to monetize, remember where you came from and think about using it for more than just announcements.
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And most likely biggest fans of the service.↩
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Never again.↩
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I think this is the same logic that John Gruber uses for not having comments on Daring Fireball. Can you imagine having to deal with both Apple trolls and fanboys below John’s The Chair piece? No thanks.↩