What is great is that it allows anyone to share ideas and information with the world very simply. There is no long and complicated setup and when you have created your account you are ready to find a few friends and off you go. It does take a while to get used to what is happening but not long. The 140 character limitation is actually a benefit as it forces brevity and allows the follower to skip through things pretty fast.
What is not so great is that it is a closed system. Twitter own it and all its content. This is bad for various reasons. First of all we have given ourselves away to Twitter. Secondly we are at the mercy of what they want to do with the system in the future and finally should the system fail temporarily or even permanently then we will be without it.
This is known and there are a lot of pundits such as Dave Winner out there saying that this is not a good state of affairs.
So what can be done. Yahoo have launched a Twitter type system that they are trialling in Brazil but I fail to see how this helps. It too is a closed system and quite frankly does nothing to help. Any system that is closed will create islands with difficult communications. There are already companies that will search across the various Social Networking sites and presumably they will just add these as they come along but that is hardly perfect and not necessarily cheap either.
So how about this as an alternative. We all set up our own tweet servers. Sounds mad huh? OR is it and this is why I think it is a good idea.
It really revolves around viewing a tweet as a message rather than as a posting to a site with servers having a common API. I see 5 main elements to this:
- Set up an account
- Follow accounts and allow accounts to follow you
- Send a tweet
- Receive a tweet
- Search tweets
Following accounts is similarly easy in that I ask my server to follow @you.yourserver.com. The server registers that following and sends a message to yourserver.com to ask if I can follow you. The answer is going to be yes, no (blocking), maybe (protected) or we don't know that person. Unfollowing and blocking can follow a similar pattern.
Send a tweet. Log the tweet on my home server just like Twitter does now AND search for all servers that have followers of me. It doesn't matter if there is one follower or one million followers from a particular server as all my server has to do is send a message containing the tweet to each of the found servers. For the receiving server it then logs that message as available for its users to collect.
Recieve a tweet. So we now have it that all the tweets from wherever that you follow are on your server. It is now up to your server to decide how it is going to deliver these to you. The current Twitter API is a very inefficient model and this would allow a server to implement more efficient methods and possibly add additional features as it saw fit. For example additional notes, multimedia etc.. This is very powerful as tweet servers would then be competing on the quality and features of service.
Search tweets. This would appear to be the one awkward element however as I am suggesting a common API all that needs to be known are the tweetservers to be searched and then the results aggregated. Furthermore it means that you could give instant priority to searches made on certain servers (your own for a start) and begin to apply more logic to it.
This shows how simple a tweetoshpere for the masses really is and accords with these 10 rules for social networking which I heartly endorse. Also when you consider that a server could also handle private tweet networks pretty straightforwardly this makes it a very attractive proposition for business and organisations.
This is not just theoretical postualting - I am actively building a demonstration system which may even be ready when you read this. Just mail me details if I have not made an additional post.
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