Idle Thoughts

I was just reading “4 Things Twitter Could Learn From Jaiku” from The Next Web, and it struck me that some people seem to completely miss the primary benefit of Twitter’s simplicity: its extensibility.

As an example, social networking sites have always been difficult to extend. None of them offered solid APIs until recently, and though Facebook offers a development platform, all extensions have to be made within the relatively limited confines of that platform.

These limited prospects for development and extension resulted in many clones with functionality slightly extended in one way or another, but without integration into a large database of users, this just caused trouble for their members.

Twitter, on the other hand, is entirely open. They provide what amounts to a communication protocol, and allow third parties to develop whatever they want on top of it. Though, as I’ve mentioned previously, this is a bad idea from a commercial perspective, it’s great for users. All they have to do is pick an extension or two to help them use the service, and they can do whatever they want with it.

Some people use Twitter to discuss the share market, some to share pictures, and some just want a more user-friendly interface, but none of these is directly integrated. If Twitter were to integrate pictures, for example, the site would become more cluttered, which would drive people away. A change in the interface would likely annoy as many people as it pleased.

One service can’t suit everyone’s needs, but a multitude can. So long as Twitter avoids integrating all of these extensions into its primary offering, it can control almost the entire microblogging arena, but any specialization, and that control evaporates.

Microblogging

It seems a week doesn’t go by without me hearing about a new microblogging service. Very likely, there are a dozen others I don’t hear about. But every time I see one I think, ‘haven’t we been through this before?’

It reminds me of the heyday of social networking sites, when every man and his dog would build a new site with a minor tweak in the hope that it would rise to the top. This culminated in the creation of Ning, a service designed to build such sites for you.

While some niche social networking sites have achieved modest success, for the most part, they don’t work, because it’s just too much trouble to maintain your identity across so many sites. Such services can easily be replicated within Facebook, for example, with a group or an applicaton on the Facebook Platform.

The need for niche microblogging sites, however, is even less apparent than the nonexistent one for niche social networking sites. With the exception of a few services (like Yammer, which is designed for corporate use, and Pownce, which allowed sharing of various media in conjunction with text, and is dead now anyway) these services are just Twitter clones centered around a particular topic.

There are all sorts of ways to handle this within Twitter. Hashtags allow messages to be tagged as relevant to a particular discussion. There are third party extensions which allow conversations to be tracked. Using another site is unnecessary, and any new service is going to have to rebuild its community.

Eventually, though, it’s going to come down to the fact that no-one is going to keep sending messages through multiple microblogs, because it is tiresome. Once people get past the novelty of all the different sites, they’re going to settle on one. And it’s going to be Twitter.

Microblogging