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Taking off the training wheels

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Technology loops, it follows a pattern that repeats, and we're in one of those loops right now.  

Here's how it goes. 

1. Something new comes along.  

2. We all use one company's product because we need it simplified. I think of this as the "training wheels" phase. Not the full-power version of the technology, but a simplified one, easy to learn on. 

3. Two forces oppose each other as the technology becomes familiar and popular. The company tries to build their lockin as the users crave more power. Even if the company didn't try to foreclose, eventually the users would break out because you can only get so much power from one vendor (strategy taxes and conflicts of interests rule, not maximum power for users). 

4. Break out! Often explosive. Another huge wave of growth around the technology as the open version permeates the market.  

5. Maturity. Back to step #1. 

That's the loop. So many things have happened like this. A classic example -- email. In the 80s most people who used email did it on closed company-owned systems like MCI, Compuserve, AppleLink, then AOL and Microsoft's corporate servers. Then along with the rise of the web, email moved to the Internet, and mail servers became commodities. Everyone had one. Companies started out not wanting to operate their own servers, then because they weren't scared of running them, they broke out. 

So then the question comes up, as we've been talking about now for years, what does the break-out from Twitter look like? We've tried a lot of theories, but before there's a breakout, everyone has to understand the technology, and to understand it, it seems you must know what it is. 

So... What is Twitter? I didn't get any answers when I asked on Sunday. I'm watching all the public twits from people who work at Twitter to see if they have any ideas. If they do, they're not evident in the public twitstream. 

I'm thinking now that Twitter is this -- A very low ramp onto blogging, which itself was a low ramp onto publishing. I told a friend today I didn't used to think it could get any lower than blogging, but I was wrong! Twitter is lower. I think for a lot of people the breakthrough in Twitter is that it makes blogging possible for them, both the reading and writing.  

For a guy like me, who mastered blogging long ago, Twitter is compelling because of the people. All these new people blogging, I want to read what they write, maybe they'll come up with something! But more and more, sorry to say, I don't think they are coming up with much. I think 140 characters is really very limiting for most people. Esp when you layer all the RT's and @screennames and #hashtags and tinyurls in and on it. It's getting really crowded there in 140-character-land. 

Plus if you believe the loop model, the best of the Twitter users, the ones who are doing the most interesting stuff with it, they're going to want more, soon. And they're going to also want their freedom. All of which says the investors in products like Tumblr are really smart, except they ought to offer more freedom than Twitter does and they don't appear to. It also suggests that Facebook, Movable Type and WordPress would be well-served to produce low-end products, ones that did just a little more than Twitter. The key here is to be, in every way, a Twitter clone, but relax some of the limits. I'd bet that the Twitter founders are wrong about 140 characters. It may have been magic at one time, but that's the past. It would be easy to conceive of a UX that was every bit as simple as Twitter's but didn't have that limit. 

Earlier today I twitted: "I like the open web so much I'm willing to accept its limits." 

Then a few hours later Larry Page hinted at the explosive breakout I'm looking for. If I can write on the web, on my own server, and still have it instantly accessible to people who follow me, whether they use twitter or splitter or donder or vixen, then I've got: 

1. My choice of tools. 

2. My choice of servers. 

3. When Twitter goes down I stay up. 

4. They can be neutral or not and no one cares. 

5. I'm no longer locked in. 

Just one little protocol to implement it. I ping them when I update. They read the document I say changed. If it did, re-index. If it didn't, ignore the ping. That's all. Everything about Twitter reduced to a new search engine from Google, something they're good at, and a small enhancement to my CMS (and to be clear, it's old tech, we've been doing this in the blogging world since 1999). 

Oh happy day! 

"cheesecake"