When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.
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A very wise statement.
It's a wonder that, with all the scaling demands placed on networks such as Facebook, and thefabulous data stores they're inventing to deal with the load, none of them have considered the web itself as a storage media, presumably because of the implicit competitive weaknesses.
There must come, at some point, a social network that uses the actual web as a read/write storage media. And it will do well, and other networks will adopt the same standards to access the customers.
And then the feature wars will come. Like the old browser leviathans, social networks will fight over who has the best UI on top of the communal data. And like the old guard, most of them won't play nice with the standards bodies.
It would have to be done well, and soon, or pent-up commercial pressure and cynicism will keep it just the wrong side of proprietary.
Dan Glegg - 13th August 2009 17:38 - #
Distributed or federated twitter already exists. It is called laconi.ca and is implemented in identi.ca
xmpp provides distributed or federated chat.
Google Wave should be federatable.
I think the rest of FB (Mafia Wars and SuperPoke) is evil, but I realize that not everyone shares my opinion.
It bothers me when people don't understand the difference between "monopoly" and "monocultural" (or "closed").
Jeffrey - 14th August 2009 20:19 - #
Jeffrey: Monopoly isn't a binary condition, it's a continuum. While nothing legally prevents competition from happening between, for example, Twitter and Identica, in practice the alternatives have no hope. For the market of small social messages, Twitter is virtually a monopoly.
This applies across all social networks at the moment; they own the product (user-generated content), and are the sole arbiters of how that content is made available. They might not do anything to actively stifle the growth of competitors, but these "markets" and "commodities" are so new that they don't have to do anything.
Blaine Cook - 17th August 2009 15:56 - #