Fixing Twitter

I want a new platform for microblogging. Twitter is a great for the information saturation problem, but it has some serious weaknesses:

• Single Namespace: Every new feed requires a new unique name. We’re going to start seeing more jsmith375s as the million John, Joan, Jill, James and José Smiths of the world sign up.
• No Granularity: Some tweets are personal minutiæ, others professional, others insightful… Cramming all this information in a single feed means following lots of people quickly leads to overload.
• Inband Signaling: If I want to say who gave me an idea, list a keyword or include a link, I do it in the post. These are characters I don’t want to allot, and the reader often doesn’t care about reading.

Tweets aren’t really blog posts, they’re parts of distributed conversations (tweetversations?). I say something to some part of the world different recepients respond in different ways — some just take it in, some say something directly back to me while others respond publicly.

Thinking of tweets as messages in an asynchronous instant messaging conversation between subsets of the population suggests a solution: XMPP with RDF tagging.

XMPP is the communications protocol used by Jabber-based IM programs including Gmail chat. Chat ids look like wholcomb@gmail.com/Home. Not only does it allow usernames to be spread across thousands of domains, it allows people to create as many subfeeds as they want.

The other component is tagging. Tonight, for example, I’m going to meet some folks for Artomatic. There’s an event in my calendar, ical:wholcomb@calendar.google.com/2009/05/30/Artomatic, I could mark that some of my tweets as having only to do with that event and the system could handle delivering those to the people I’m meeting up with while not bothering the world at large with my scheduling changes.

Or, I could subscribe to a service using a tag cloud and a data rate. The system take tens of thousands of tweets and let the most popular ones filter up to the top. Each person gets to choose how fast they get new information and gets to play a part in the ecology. You can combat issues like the long tail by sending a tweet to a large enough random sample to get a reliable sense of how interesting it is. With a system like this if you have something important enough to say, there’s the possibility you’ll get to say it to the entire world.

The arguments over Twitter have centered around privacy, but the idea privacy = secrecy is dead. It’s like a samurai fight movie where someone stands for a second seemingly unaffected before falling into two pieces. Secrecy is already dead, it’s just not fallen apart yet. People who recognize this are going to outpace people trying to own and control information by so far there’s no catching up.