Scripting News: How basic is Twitter?

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

How basic is Twitter?

Like so many others in the tech blogging world, I've spent the last few weeks exploring Twitter. I understand that there were lots of people using it before me, and before that, the developers of Twitter envisioned something that all the rest of us didn't. So before going any further, let's pause for a moment and appreciate their innovation and contribution to the richness of the cyber-environment that we work in. Congrats on a great accomplishment.

Now the next step is to wonder what the next step is. ";->"

I've been following the digging work that Nik Cubrilovic and Steve Poland have been doing, with great interest, particularly the report yesterday on the upcoming Twitter API feature that will allow users to direct private messages at invidual users. Both Steve and Nik have observed that names in the Twitter space may become quite valuable in the future. And Nik observes that the Twitter folk may have made a mistake by not reserving some of the juiciest names for themselves, like GET, for example.

@get "berkeley weather"

If you play it out, the Twitter command line could evolve to be something much like the Unix command line, with an important difference, it's world-wide in scope. Before you lose your breath, this is hardly the first such command line, the address bar in the browser has a similar property as does the search box on Google (of course, any search engine). But Twitter's would be newly interesting because the thing it wires together, better than any environment before, is something we're all interested in -- people.

So inevitably, a query about the value of namespaces leads you to wonder if there will be TwitterClones, web-based services that emulate the Twitter API, that keep internal data structures similar to Twitter, and most important, peer with Twitter, the same way Twitter peers with IM and SMS systems.

This is as far as I got in my thinking when last night I decided to ask Les Orchard, a developer I know for quite a few years, and who I've worked with on a couple of projects, both of which use the kind of technology that would be required for such a project --

What if there were an open source implementation of Twitter?

Nik Cubrilovic happened to be online at the moment and he jumped in with an idea. Les confessed that he was thinking of doing such a project. I thought to myself that there must be a lot of developers thinking about this right about now. We agreed it was an interesting question, and I said I'd write it up on "Scripting News", which is what I'm doing right now.

What do you think? Is Twitter important, like web servers, or blogging software, so important that we should have an open source implementation of something that works like Twitter and can connect up to Twitter? Where are the tough sub-projects, and how much does it depend on the willingness of the developers of Twitter #1 to support systems that connect to theirs?

If you have something to say about this, either post a comment here, or write a blog post, and point to this article and your piece will show up in this Technorati query.

Les Orchard: "Twitter is not just a technological thing." Amen.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:37 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr