This concept is called: Network effect. But the jump from “it has network effect” to “it must be run like a government” deserves some more explanation.
For example, telephone providers, although regulated, are not run like a government. In the past we had all kinds of messenger applications, and people often installed more of them, or used a client that could connect to more of them. So why is Facebook and Twitter different?
Would it be possible to create an alt-Twitter, together with a multi-Twitter app that would simultaneously connect to Twitter and alt-Twitter? Then you could post on both places, read messages from both places in one feed, and maybe set it up so that posts banned at one site are automatically reposted at the other. (As far as I know, Twitter provides an API, so this should be doable.)
Now did I just describe a startup-worthy idea, or is there some good reason why something like this wouldn’t work? For example, maybe people don’t use apps anymore, and access everything by web. Maybe the app would get banned at app stores. Maybe the licensing terms of Twitter API forbid that.
Telephone providers are neutral—they don’t disconnect clients because they don’t like what people are talking about with each other. If they did, we’d have the same kind of outrage.
alt-Twitter aps are sort of possible, TweetDeck is one example (they eventually bought it).
But such aps don’t solve the main problem: if Twitter decides to kick somebody out, you won’t see his tweets in other apps as well.
This concept is called: Network effect. But the jump from “it has network effect” to “it must be run like a government” deserves some more explanation.
For example, telephone providers, although regulated, are not run like a government. In the past we had all kinds of messenger applications, and people often installed more of them, or used a client that could connect to more of them. So why is Facebook and Twitter different?
Would it be possible to create an alt-Twitter, together with a multi-Twitter app that would simultaneously connect to Twitter and alt-Twitter? Then you could post on both places, read messages from both places in one feed, and maybe set it up so that posts banned at one site are automatically reposted at the other. (As far as I know, Twitter provides an API, so this should be doable.)
Now did I just describe a startup-worthy idea, or is there some good reason why something like this wouldn’t work? For example, maybe people don’t use apps anymore, and access everything by web. Maybe the app would get banned at app stores. Maybe the licensing terms of Twitter API forbid that.
Telephone providers are neutral—they don’t disconnect clients because they don’t like what people are talking about with each other. If they did, we’d have the same kind of outrage.
alt-Twitter aps are sort of possible, TweetDeck is one example (they eventually bought it).
But such aps don’t solve the main problem: if Twitter decides to kick somebody out, you won’t see his tweets in other apps as well.
Yeah, this would need an entire ecosystem of applications:
Twitter
alt-Twitter
multi-Twitter client
an archiving service that you could set up to make backups of all your tweets, regularly verify their existence, and repost them when deleted
We don’t even have the second step yet.