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Twitter as coral reef, cont'd

Thursday, May 28, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I've been feverishly experimenting some new ideas this week, the most interesting of which is a mashup between Twitter and Disqus.  

This should make Fred Wilson happy, since he is an investor in both companies. But that's not why I did it. 

Here's why I did it. The 140-character limit is driving me crazy. 

I need a place to express ideas that just don't fit into 140. 

There are some, believe it or not.  

So here's an example. Early this morning Mike Arrington posted a teaser on his exclusive personal Twitter account. "Get ready for a very, very big news day." Well, Mike ought to know, everyone's telling him stuff they tell no one else.  

So I wanted to post a comment asking What's up? What does everyone think this means. 

So that's what I did. 

http://twdsc.us/2.html  

Note the URL. Cute, huh? It's a pre-shortened url. No need to push it through any of the commercial shorteners. New trend started by my friend Andrew Baron with his new superhot beta startup mag.ma.  

Anyway. So far there are 11 comments with some very interesting theories about what's up. If nothing else, it's an inventory of ideas out there that people are expecting as announcements any day now. Google's realtime search engine (would be great if it supported RSS both ways and weblogs.com compatible pinging). Microsoft's new search engine Bing (for which expectations are really low, so it should be easy for them to impress). And on and on... 

Add your own two cents. 

And my next sub-project is to create a bookmarklet that makes it super-easy for anyone to start a comment thread on any Twitter post they like. 

So Fred, whatcha think? ";->" 

PS: Proof again that Twitter is the great coral reef of the latter part of this decade. It's so easy to attach something to it, that might turn into a branch or perhaps an entirely new species! 

PPS: I'm working my way through James Burke's fantastic series Connections. Just watched episode 4, which ends with the beginnings of the modern computer. Hollerith, who invented the famous card that many people used to program Fortran and Basic (such as yours truly) decided to make them the same size as the dollar bill of the day. Because there was already so much machinery that existed to process them. Oh yeah. That's the kind of tech I love. Build on what's out there. More coral-reef thinking! Yehi. 

Update: The big announcement is Google Wave. How much you want to bet in 5 years it'll be as famous as OpenDoc is today.