Does Twitter need to be killed or fixed?

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2021-07-23 22:00:04

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 “Why Does Everything Suck?”) and cross-posted at Silicon Alley Insider, the New York-based entrepreneur says that if some of the critics of the company have their way, Twitter could find itself effectively disemboweled before it has had a chance to even become a business:

“It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source, distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API.”

Why do people want to disintermediate Twitter? Dave Winer says it’s because he doesn’t like the idea of that stream of content disappearing somehow when the service is down (or when Twitter goes under), and compares the service to the Web pages that were created during the early days of the Web. Marc Canter, another cantankerous early Web guy, says Twitter needs to be decentralized and standardized because it’s as important as the DNS system behind the Internet.