Twitter is like Napster
- The Revolution: Both opened people’s eyes to a significantly new type of online collaboration/communication. Napster: music file sharing. Twitter: short message sharing.
- The Limitation: Both were fundamentally centralized services. For Napster, this became a legal problem. For Twitter, it has been mostly a scaling problem to date, but expect other issues soon.
It’s not that file sharing didn’t exist before Napster, or that the modes of communication enabled by Twitter haven’t been around for a long time also - but these two were the most public, visible, accessible, centralized services that demonstrated the possibilities of the medium to a much larger audience. Napster was replaced in short order with a chaos of decentralized alternatives. Twitter may well follow the same path.
(Notes: prompted by this article on CenterNetworks; see also reblog of bijan’s post below. My twitter stream is here, lest anyone think I’m a non-believer.)
There is a growing meme around Wordpress latest theme called Prologue.
Some are predicting that this could become a threat to Twitter.
I don’t think so.
I could never imagine using Prologue the way I use Twitter. If you take a look at my Twitter updates over the past week and the interactions I’ve had with Charlie, Eric, Brad, Rafer, Dave, Fred etc.
Sometimes I will send someone a direct message or a replyto or just a public tweet.
Twitter is a messaging platform that is as open as I want or as narrow as I want, anytime I want.
That’s why it’s unique.
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