There must be some way out of here

Thursday, April 02, 2009 by Dave Winer.

According to the authors of Battlestar Galactica, Bob Dylan was tuning into a cosmic song that drives the universe when he wrote All Along The Watchtower. There are so many great scenes in the BSG series that revolve around the song. In the last episode Starbuck has seconds to jump Galactica away from the exploding Cylon death star, she's fumbling at the controls and says "There must be some kind of way out of here" and then proceeds to transport us to a magic place (no spoilers). In the background The Song is playing. 

I'm getting that feeling about Twitter.  

BookOfJames: "Maybe it's good for Twitter to burn bright and fast. Once the fad is over, things may settle down for the better. Who knows?" 

Maybe so. 

Maybe Twitter is just a crude child's drawing of the promised land of online communication.  

Another step on the Yellow-brick Road? If so, I think we have, for sure, taken a detour into the land of the poppy flowers or the Wicked Witch of the West. For me, the real eye-opener was this tweet from TheEllenShow, promising a treat to all her munchkins if they drove her follower number over 500K. Think about it -- that's asking for people to spam on her behalf. I follow a lot of people (more than Ellen, for example) and that meant I got a lot of people retweeting her pitch. And while it's true I can choose not to follow Ellen, there's no way to not-follow all the spam. And with a half-million followers, that's a lot of spam.  

All this predicts what we have to expect when Oprah joins the mess. And when the Congressional elections are fought in Twitterspace. All of a sudden the lovely patch of green, the bright optimistic future we had for it has turned into the key phrase in The Watchtower. 

"There must be some way out of here..." 

Said the joker to the thief.  

Increasingly, I don't think it's Laconica. I think they have the wrong idea about who their potential users are and what they want, and what to expect from them. Their plan came out a few days ago, and if I want to operate a twitter-like service, I'm stuck with limited customization options and I have to pay to bring customers to them. I don't think this works. 

No one has figured out how in this space to enable an honest non-spammer type such as myself to build a nice little business off this technology. Even worse, no one has figured out how to sell a service to a mainstream publication that wants to establish a news network without all the crap that's showing up on twitter.com. 

I mentioned this briefly in a post a few of days ago. Let me elaborate. 

I'm pretty sure the FriendFeed guys have missed the mark, and also pretty sure they know it.  

Here's how I'd look at it if I were on their team. 

1. Our key strength: We know how to scale systems. (Based on experience at Google with Maps and Mail.) 

2. Our big opportunity: People want to start their own twitters. (This is my assumption. Unproven. Risky. Who? A-list bloggers, struggling news organizations, visionary networks of bloggers wanting to form new kinds of groups. AOL. Yahoo. MSN.) 

3. Another strength: We know how to design APIs. (They do, the FF API is very nice. Could be better, and from what I've seen they know how to make it better.) 

So, in case it isn't obvious by now, I'd counsel them to get into the platform business. Enable guys who have mastered AppEngine and EC2 to build front-ends for their back-end, provide a toolkit for building your own twitter and then let a thousand flowers bloom. I'd also raise more money so I could acquire the winners, suck their features into the platform, and then do it again. I think this is the winning strategy. If Twitter had FF's strengths (don't think they do) I'd counsel them to do the same. And for gods' sakes, stay in the background, don't compete with your users. More on this in the next paragraph. 

One of the reasons Twitter is so demoralizing (at least for this Twitter user, ymmv) is something Jean-Louis Gassee once taught me by asking a question. 

"David, are you a pimp or are you a whore?" 

It was a good question. And one the Twitter owners would do well to answer. 

The better business for them is to be pimps not whores. Fade into the background. Let Twitter become infrastructure, a platform for impressarios. Biz and Ev just can't compete with the dazzling personalities they've attracted. Yet geez Luigi, Biz is going on Colbert tonight! That's a bad idea. It's going to make Ellen and Oprah jealous, Leno and Letterman, Barbara, George Will, etc. Wait until there's competiton, and networks own twitters. The stars (whores) are going to get paid big bucks, like Howard Stern, to draw in users. And they're not going to want to compete with you on a personal level. And Ev and Biz just aren't that interesting as celebrities. But as pimps, maybe... 

BTW, to answer JLG's question, 25 years later -- I'm a whore and I know it.  

Not a big-time one. Just an average one. Nothing special. 

Of course that's going to get quoted.