Positively Glorious!

On Tuesday, Greg Pass wrote an article on the Twitter Blog called “Building on Open Source” where he states that:

When we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to use open source whenever it makes sense. By this approach, much of Twitter is now built on open source software.

The article goes on to describe two open source spinoffs, Kestrel and Cache-Money, that Twitter has developed and given to the open source community. While the article lauds Twitter’s commitment to Open Source as if they are constantly thinking of ways to help the community, I find the suggesting at least a bit hypocritical, if not downright disingenuous.

It seems to me that any suggestion by Twitter that they truly support the open source community is nothing more than lip-service, until they stand-up and acknowledge the OpenMicroBlogging standard. I’m not asking for them to throw their energy into it, mind you- just a simple admission that the damn thing exists would be enough for me.

Laconica and OpenMicroBlogging

Put simply, OpenMicroBlogging is an open standard for Twitter-like text messaging.  It was developed by  Evan Prodromou of Control Yourself to allow federation, or cross-communication between microblogging servers.

To use an analogy from the early web: Twitter is something like Prodigy, CompuServ or early AOL. In the early 90s, people using a service like AOL were basically restricted to information that was found within the landscape of AOL. “The web” to someone on AOL was almost entirely restricted to what AOL provided- in a sense: allowed them to see. Eventually, things were opened up, and AOL was forced to open too, becoming more of a portal to the “actual” web, rather than a sole provider of information.

Twitter represents a similar dynamic. Right now, Twitter is seen as the end-all, be-all of Micro-Messaging. Everyone on Twitter talks to everyone else on Twitter. But this situation is as useful in the long-run as if I could only email people on my internet service provider’s system. Email works because I can email anyone that has an email account. I can email someone in Lahore that’s never heard of my service provider. To put it bluntly, email would suck if I could only email my wife and a couple friends who have Qwest.

As great and awesome as it is, Twitter has failed in this respect. On Twitter, I can only communicate with those on Twitter. So Evan wrote a better system. On this system, I could communicate with my friends in Hood River on one server just as easily as I could with my friend in Lahore, and both of them didn’t need to be on the same- basically- AOL account.

As a real example. I use Evan’s original server Identi.ca as my account to send messages, and I can talk directly with Don Park, who uses his own server called Portvangelists. We can talk to one another as if it were one system- and that makes it powerful.

Twitter and OpenMicroBlogging

Louis Gray has been following the Twitter vs. OpenMicroBlogging struggle for some time. He notes in one article that:

It appears Twitter may just be learning from AOL’s mistakes however.  In a bug report posted last July in the Twitter Development Bug tracking system there is an issue titled “OpenMicroblogging Support”.  The user, “4braham“, posted it, suggesting “Support for the OpenMicroBlogging specification would allow for Twitter users to follow users of other microblogging services.”  Alex Payne, API Lead for Twitter, responded, saying, “Sure, someday, after it sees some adoption.”

That seemed like a big deal, and excited the many of us who wait for a day when it’s no-longer true that 99% of the US has never heard of either Twitter or MicroBlogging. Federation would encourage more people, with more varied uses, to start using such a system. I could, for instance, create a system in my company that allows certain communication to be strictly in-house, while still allowing those on the system access to the outside world. And that’s just one example, there are probably myriad other uses that I wouldn’t think of.

Right now, this is not likely, because Twitter, currently the dominant player in the market, won’t allow it. In fact, an entire company was spun-off to allow in-house communitation. The Geneology company Geni found that a Twitter-like solution would be useful if they could control access to the communication. They founded Yammer, specifically because Twitter was totally unusable as an enterprise solution. Yammer functions almost exactly like Twitter, except that communication on a network is limited.

Unfortunately, Yammer suffers from a similar problem as Twitter. No inter-system communication. An open standard could, in theory, allow people to create a system that allows both inter- and intra-system communication, protecting messages that need it, and communicating openly when desired.

The prospect of Twitter entering the OpenMicroBlogging arena was exciting because it would promote this kind of development. Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived, as Louis Gray notes in this post from December 3rd:

In a very quiet announcement in a bug request on Google today, Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, announced the popular microupdate service would switch the status of implementing OpenMicroblogger support from “Accepted”, to “Won’t Fix”.

Louis went on to detail an effort by Evan to engage the heads of Twitter:

Back in July, Evan Prodromou, author of the OpenMicroblogging spec, put the offer out, asking, “If you have some ideas of what sort of adoption metrics we have to hit, let me know.”  The question went unanswered however as the issue quickly became one of the most popular issues in the queue for Twitter to implement.  It appears in this particular instance, Twitter simply doesn’t want to listen.

The final statement is the key. It does seem that, when talking about OpenMicroBlogging, Twitter does not want to listen. And that’s a shame, because the rest of the community seems prepared to jump through hoops to work with them. It’s not as if they are setting up roadblocks, they are simply ignoring the question all together.

Is It Lack of Usage, or Competition?

Twitter pays lip-service to the Open Source community, but seems to forget that OpenMicroBlogging is a part of that community, and an important part. In the long-term, Evan’s standard is likely to be the most important aspect to the MicroBlogging revolution- it will allow communication in a way that Twitter denies. Rather than face that, work with it, and even steer the development, they’ve simply turned their backs.

It seems to me that any suggestion that Twitter “prefers” open source, should be taken with a large portion of salt.

The question, of course, is why. Twitter suggests that “there’s not enough usage,” but the usage is large enough and growing. I think that’s a feint. My wonder is whether Twitter is worried about the competition. Federated servers could be seen as a threat to Twitter’s marketshare- but this calls into question Twitter’s marketabliity.

Federation would draw more people from more demographics to MicroBlogging. The entire pot would get bigger. Twitter would be required to position themselves as attractive to those people. They would have to say “Yes, you have choices, but ours is better.”

It makes me wonder whether their lack of interest is because there’s no usage, or because their business model is, despite all the hype, really fragile enough that they can’t attract users in the long-run.