Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey outlines a plan to fund a small independent team to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media, a standard that Twitter would support. I advocate something different, Twitter already has the bugs and scaling issues solved for a global notification network. Let's add a few APIs and create a new universe. It'll happen a lot faster with much better results imho. Interestingly I recorded a podcast on just this topic, a week ago today. #
I've been down the road Jack proposes to take Twitter down, it's fraught with problems. Social media has been around a long time and there are plenty of competing standards for integrating platforms. Had they proposed such a standard when they were starting Twitter, no one would have cared, and it would have had a chance of working. Now it's a huge industry with lots at stake and lots of entities that would like to keep it from standardizing. Now maybe Jack knows this, and it's meant as a PR thing, and I'm sure the press will love it. Until they forget about it. It's time for a proprietary approach, one that is open to cloning. That can work because there's a single decision-making entity. If their goal really is to create a standard they can do it, much the way we created standards for content syndication when our product dominated. Waiting for an open development group to synthesize something that can be broadly supported, well I suppose it could happen, but it rarely does. #