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Does Twitter need to be killed or fixed?

excerpt Like Hank Williams (no, not *that* Hank Williams) I too am fascinated by all of the recent talk in the blogosphere about how Twitter needs to be decentralized and/or disintermediated for the good of the Twitter-verse. In a post written for his own blog (creatively titled “W ...

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    Doug Walker 2 months ago with 1 point

    I have a weird relationship with twitter, or in FB lingo "it's complicated". Sometimes I hate her, but boy do I miss her when she is gone. At one point I might have said the same thing about Facebook. When in the throes of addiction it can hard to tell the difference between an essential service and a frivolous luxury.

    Disintermediation of twitter or something twitter-like is innevitable. I am more loyal to Twhirl than I ever was to twitter and if twhirl operated the same way on a different protocol, I couldn't care less. The role that twitter plays in my life could very easily be snapped up by another (open-source or just more reliable) infrastructure.

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    mathewi 2 months ago with 1 point

    I think you might be right about people being devoted (or perhaps
    addicted) to the function rather than the actual service or protocol,
    Doug -- I would probably also be happy with just about anything that
    replicated the functionality, which isn't really rocket surgery by any
    means, just as I was happy to move from one IM client to another.

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    JoeDuck 2 months ago with 1 point

    Not killed or fixed - Twitter is fine. It is ridiculous to suggest that the content stream at Twitter is mission critical to anybody and everybody can revert to IM, email, or heaven forbid a phone call if Twitter is down for a few hours.

    Cnstant social connectivity carries the illusion of desirability, but I think if one carefully reflects on the downtimes one finds they are no big deal. Twitter as a nice little gossip and microblog connection and important link alert? Sure. Twitter as essential communications tool? Nope. Get a life!

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    John Minnihan 2 months ago with 1 point

    With all due respect to Dave & Marc, this is just silly.

    I really like Twitter and have gone on record as saying I'd probably pay for a premium account. But too important to leave to one company?

    That's akin to saying that Paypal's money-transfer service is too important to be left to that company. Or that search is too important to be left to Google.

    Other money services have come & gone, and companies have tried (and will continue) to wrest search share from Google. Each of the services provided by those companies is vastly more important to the conduct of business on the Internet that Twitter.

    If you want to build a Twitter companion service, build it. If you want to siphon off every single message from the public time-line for "safe-guarding"... um, ok, do it. Knock yourself out.

    Just stop the silliness. Twitter is interesting & useful, but it is *not* a public utility.

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    engtech 2 months ago with 1 point

    "Twitter needs to be decentralized and standardized because it’s as important as the DNS system behind the Internet."

    say it with me now... I-R-C

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    Mark Dykeman 2 months ago with 1 point

    Twitter's value, in my opinion, is in the collection of voices that Tweet together and less about its technical capabilities. The function is more useful that whatever platform it sits upon. And, in a nod to Winer, there is some value to some people in the actual content stored on Twitter's servers. Irreplaceable? No. But, as a historical artifact, worth keeping around, which I believe was Dave's concern, referencing the original WWW stuff from CERN.

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    David 2 months ago with 1 point

    Off-topic comment: Is it just me, or is there something wrong with the pagination/navigation to older posts on this blog?

    For instance, in both IE and Firefox, when I put in http://www.mathewingram.com/work/page/4/ I see the same posts as when I put in http://www.mathewingram.com/work/ . The only difference is the presence of "Next Entries" link at the bottom of /page/4.

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    mathewi 2 months ago with 1 point

    I think it's an issue with my new theme, David -- it doesn't paginate the way the old one did. I'm still working on it. If you're looking for something specific, you can go to either the Search bar or the Archives link, both of which are in the upper right-hand corner.

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    svartling 1 month ago with 1 point

    Not killed anyways. But maybe a better UI.

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