E.

Back in the early 90′s there were a number of competing networks floating around AOL, CompuServe, MSN, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. Like twitter today the solutions were rather closed, and didn’t interoperate with each other. An AOL user couldn’t send an email to someone on GEnie, participate in CIS’s CB or take part in a message area on Prodigy. Over the next couple of years companies moved their support to either newsgroups or web based forums, people abandoned CB for IRC on the internet and email in these services because gateways to traditional internet mail. This is (slowly) happening in the IM space now as jabber (and gtalk) has been interoperating with a number of different services.

There have been a few attempts to build a twitter killer, and they’ve failed, bigger is not the solution. I think that a small network of servers based on RSS Cloud will show up (probably an identica implementation) and interoperate. It will be initially small and rag tag much like the net in 92… mostly tech heads and we won’t be abandoning twitter while we play in that space. Once this starts happening there will be pressure on twitter to interoperate with this network but they will refuse as their business model depends on them owning the data and parsing it out.

Eventually a movie studio or celeb, maybe @AplusK, will say “wait, I can run my own server, own my network, run advertising and build my brand instead of twitter’s and I have enough pull that I can pull some my fans with me”. Much like email before it twitter will eventually break down the wall and federate with the outside network.

At the end of the day closed systems are proof of concept for the ‘net once they become popular we route around them they have to open or perish.

And now that I’m thinking about this.. I reserve the right to use this comment in a blog post.