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Twitter. Needs. Competition.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Never has it been more clear -- we are building a dangerously precarious centralized system that will, given everything we know about computer networks, at some point, fail. It's so important now that the US State Department got in the loop in the last couple of days. 

Meanwhile there's an incredibly vibrant competition in the Twitter client space. At least three leading apps: Twitterdeck, Seesmic and Tweetie, are slugging it out. Each with strengths, waves of new versions, users comparing products, always something new to look forward to. The kind of rapid evolution we desperately need in the back-end. 

There's a little bit of Facebook in the mix (it has a lot of users, but not many of them use these clients, I think) and yes there is Identi.ca, but it has a very small user base compared to Twitter and Facebook. 

In a thread that was spawned from a Twitter post earlier today, we talk about the possibility of a competitor to Twitter coming from Google or Facebook. Not sure who else could launch a back-end that would find enough support among users to gain critical mass. And I agree, totally, with Don Park, that if Facebook wants to play, they must start from scratch, with a totally simple system that matches Twitter, and adds stability, performance, beauty, or a few sought-after features.  

Google would compete by building a system out of components of the open web, the small-pieces-loosely-joined approach. I outlined how this would work in an earlier blog post.