This is a great article from Ars Technica that explains how a bunch of published and defacto standards come together – more or less – to make Mastodon go and create a decentralized social web.
Tag: twitter
-
Is the open internet dead?
I was fortunate enough to get online in the mid-90’s. I wrote some terrible software to configure Dial Up Networking in Windows 3.1, and then sold it to a local ISP for years of free access.
At that point, consumers were rapidly adopting what I’ll call “open” technologies, including email, forums (USENET), messaging (IRC) and file transfer (ftp). The web was about to be littered with millions of consumer home pages, hosted by Geocities and people’s internet service providers.
Since then, nearly all consumer technology growth has moved from open to closed systems. Facebook and Google are “closed” in the sense that those companies exert total control of the platform, in a winner-take-most marketplace.
It’s hard to find recent examples of new, open technologies that had a lot of direct consumer adoption. The few I could think of are:
- Firefox (which went mainstream in the U.S. around 2004)
- Bittorrent (2005)
- RSS (2005)
- SMS (2008)
- open video formats (2010, when YouTube added support)
Of these, I’d argue that only open video is thriving. Of the rest:
- Firefox is suffering under pressure from Chrome
- Bittorrent is being replaced by Netflix, Spotify and Hulu
- RSS has been all but abandoned, replaced by twitter and weibo
- SMS is under heavy attack by closed platforms like WhatsApp and Skype
Today, the fastest-growing platforms are all closed and controlled by large corporations.
Very few start-ups go public. This means that if you’re a successful new company, built on an open platform, you’re likely to be acquired by one of the incumbents and merged into their closed platform.
Is it still possible for open to win? Or is it time to give up, and search for a political solution?
-
How I feel about the Twitter API change “controversy." Dave Winer, where are you now?
-
foursquare – Like twitter, but Useful 🙂
foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can:
- identify what city the user is in
- read/write user and friends’ check-in data
- look up information for a particular location
- make/send friend requests
- retrieve venue data
- perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins
- add venues, tips, and to-dos
This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are? Or a navigation app that automatically checks in when I arrive at a location? It also opens up some interesting possibilities for advertisers. Want to create a location-aware application that can target relevant local offers – build a foursquare-aware version of Urbanspoon.
You could also use it to push foursquare data out of their own user base and to the public at large. For example, I could build an uber-app that would allow me to tell my family that I’m running late for Thanksgiving dinner, bundle in some traffic data to estimate an ETA, and push notifications out to foursquare, twitter, or even plain old SMS.
The comparisons to twitter are obvious but understated. Unlike twitter, foursquare has a historical record of high-value, targetable, structured data. It’s hard to make sense of a single twitter stream, let alone millions of them. But location data has structure – it can easily be parsed and sorted; relationships can be identified between people, locations, times – and that can be used to target advertising, tailor mobile services or even implement discretionary pricing.
Unlike twitter, an open foursquare solves a user, carrier, and advertiser problem with ready, revenue generating implications. As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Scoble was right – foursquare will be bigger than twitter.