Twitter is not a protocol, any more than Windows or Myspace or Symbian are protocols. Twitter is a proprietary platform under the control of a single company, and treating it as a protocol is dangerous to both companies and their users.
The internet was pretty closed when DARPA owned it and so TCP was proprietary. Fortunately it became ubiquitous, was written up in an RFC and we can all inter-operate now.
Distributed blogging you say. Sounds like this newfangled NNTP protocol I just read about might be just the thing. Maybe I could build a startup around that
Twitter as a protocol is pretty stupid. It's trivial. Also, as a messaging protocol, it sucks. 140 characters? :/
There's far better more widely used communication protocols out there, and new ones being made all the time. Difference is Twitter has a fantastic hype machine.
It's really cool that the founders will have full access to the Justin TV team and the Twitter team. I bet that this will be a great competitive advantage.
There's a vague RFS3 idea that's been festering in my brain for a few months, and since I have a cofounder problem (i.e. I don't have one) I'd love it if someone with more time would implement this:
My problem with Twitter is that I can only select information by author. A lot of stuff people say is uninteresting to me, but I follow anyway because some of it is good. As a corollary, finding new people to follow is tricky.
There are the search feeds, and while some topics are easily filtered by a couple of keywords, most of the time this becomes too complex to keep up. I'd like to be able to train a classifier for stuff I'm interested in, weighted by whether the person is my friend, etc. New tweets would be given a score (possibly in more than one dimension) and presented accordingly.
I started sketching out a system very similar to this a while ago - I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of Twitter-using hackers have had the same thought, TBH. The problem is, as you've correctly identified, time!
As well as keyword filtering and friend bonus there are a ton of things you can pull into the mix. I was actually working on two ideas, one to tell you whether you should follow someone based on their twitter fingerprint and your preferences, and one to pull out interesting stuff from the stream. As I replied further down this thread, interesting is just damn hard.
Even trying to concretely identify what I found interesting such that it could be expressed as a grammar or decision tree or set of regexps or whatever... yeah, never really got round to it. I'd keep realising new properties of tweets that made them interesting to me.
It's a fascinating problem, though, and very closely related to the "Oh dear gods I have ten thousand unread RSS items" one - that I still haven't solved, nor seen an acceptable solution for! We're drilling down into sentiment right now, but that's not a solution in and of itself; it's an interesting filter though, in terms of only showing stuff with extreme sentiment or stuff that deviates from an individual's normal. It's almost a boringness anti-filter. Kinda works, but is in no fit state to release - again, due to time!
One reason why I don't use twitter much is that a lot of tweets are uninteresting. Perhaps a Google-style Markov algorithm could work for filtering a feed.
I am not at the level of Sergey Brin by any means, but if the its parent feeds are given a value based on how many people follow them, relative to others of similar keywords, there would be a mathematical way to filter them.
i certainly agree that increasingly, software fortunes will be made by applying ever more intelligent and adaptive criteria to the information that actually makes it to an eyeball.
I'm actually doing something in this neighborhood for a project for a class I'm in. Basically, I'm just looking at tweets in general and trying to classify them as reviews -- e.g. I loved ____ it's great. I had originally intended to make a trainable 'spam' filter for tweets, but it proved to be too large a project for the assignment timeline. Would love to hear more from you.
Twitter idea: Every day people I'm following post "I'll be at X in two hours doing Y." It would be great if that information could be pulled out of Twitter and put somewhere useful, like my Calendar or in an iPhone app.
(And while we're at it I still want a day planner that plans my day for me, based on my ToDo list, what my friends are doing, and what's going on around me.)
It's probably not trivial to put the firehose in place. Until they have some way of reliably and scalably opening it up and charging for it, close partners are probably the only practical customers.
400 tweets/sec + metadata comes out to less than 0.5 mbit/sec or approx 4.5 GB/day. That's less than a dollar daily in traffic costs at the Amazon rates, lowest tier.
One can see why they don't want everyone and their mother pulling it, but it's hardly rocket-science, once the infrastructure is set up.
Presumably Twitter is doing this because they have limited time, and they feel like giving priority to YC companies makes sense because they are well vetted.
It's not a great system, but even a bad policy is sometimes a step in the right direction.
Wow, to say that Twitter owns the protocol is quite a statement at this early stage of the game for this space. Twitter just took the number one third-party feature and integrated it into their own platform, it’s called lists and if you don’t have it you will soon. What would protect me from the same?
“Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients." Let’s not be so shortsighted here. The opportunity is to innovate in the space and that just doesn’t mean on top of. Sounds like we just limited our options to those that can partner with instead of those that compete.
After reading your library, I have something to say to YC, but no way I'm stupid enuf to post it on the Internet!
P.S. I'll give you a hint: the demographics celebrated in your start-up post vs. me. 49 yr old female: 2 level 80's in WoW + many other lower lvls, living with engineers at my house to get this great idea off the ground and get our application submitted (since Friday), .... YC can read the rest about me in my application, don't think that anyone else can :-(......
We couldn't be happier because we had already integrated Twitter and now know what API's that we can use for our on-line debates!
On-line presence is limited and only static right this second, however, it is our goal that anyone who looks at them will 'get it' (especially our moms). Feedback appreciated.
