Decentralization as advantage for companies

Decentralized services, like email, have a big advantage for users. I can send email to anyone that I have the email address of. The advantage for me is that even if my friends use a different email provider, I can still send them emails. It would be a huge problem if I'd need an email account with every provider that I wanted to send emails to. That I can use one account to send email to anyone that reads email is an advantage for me.

Lets assume for a moment that you could only send email to the people at the provider where you're a customer. My friends would need to be customers at the same provider as well if I wanted to send an email to them. If I wanted to send email to someone completely different, maybe at the other side of the globe, it would probably be impossible. It's important that everyone you want to send email to is a customer at the same provider as you.

Now lets assume that another provider starts to offer a new and cool email related service, maybe they send a free song every week. Now a few of my friends will move to this new service, they like the free songs. And I can't send email to them anymore. So, now I have to move as well. And then a few more people move. And now the parents move and the grandparents move. They don't like the songs, but they want to send email to their children and grandchildren.

Every time a new and better provider appears people will move, first slowly, but after some time, faster. The centralized structure of this email system makes people move in groups and because some people are part of multiple groups, they'll make other groups move as well, until everyone has moved.

Another disadvantage that appears is that a centralized system needs to be one size fits all. And while this somewhat works for t-shirts, this doesn't work at all for software and websites.

Luckily email doesn't work this way, but some websites do. For example, it's impossible to have multiple Twitter providers. Their terms of service don't allow it. A new service that provides micro blogging can't work together with Twitter. So, if at some point a new service comes along and Twitter isn't the hot new thing anymore, then people will flock to the new service, because everyone is.

On the other hand, if Twitter would interoperate with other services, then there is no reason for people to move, because they can still send messages to their friends and everyone they care about. The people who like Twitter will stay and the people who don't like it, will move. You'll only switch if a different service better fits your needs.

Can't play with Twitter

In Tweeting about Twitter's Terms Dave Winer writes:

You can't be half in and half out. Either you connect to Twitter, and they own you and your users, or you don't connect to Twitter.

So we can't play with Twitter, but the other way around Twitter can't play with us. At some point in the future rssCloud based microblogging clients will take off and Twitter will have to change their terms of service to allow us to let them play with us. At that point we won't care anymore.

Twitter's Pavlovion dogs

I tweeted about it before: I think the Twitter website isn't realtime, because the little number in the title of the webpage makes people click the blue label that shows there are new tweets. It therefore increases the engagement on the Twitter website.

If I have Twitter open in my browser I will click the blue box to get a few pellets with new tweets. I can't help it. It's also the main reason not to use the Twitter website (apart from this I actually quite like it).

MMS photo sharing on Twitter

It seems it is now possible to share photos with MMS to Twitter. It's interesting to notice that the people at Orange UK figured out that if let people send MMS messages to an interesting service you can make a lot of money.

I have never send an MMS in my life and I probably never will, but if the use is interesting or valuable enough, I just might.

The other important thing to notice is that Orange UK can (and probably will) save half of the money (and bandwidth) that would normally be needed to send a MMS. They only have to receive the MMS from their customer. To get the photo to Twitter they only need a few servers that call the API.

A commandline script for Twitter

This is the script that I use with Vim to send my Twitter updates.

In Vim you can use it by typing

!!perl twitter.pl

If you then type Enter it will send the current line to Twitter.

You do need to install Net::Twitter and its dependencies.

Write Twitter drafts in Vim

Not everyone writes drafts for his Twitter posts. It seems silly even to do this.

But for the people who don't think writing drafts is silly (and use Vim), I wrote a few lines of Vim script that will help them keep their lines just short enough.

Put these lines in your .vimrc file and start writing. You should change the filename to the name of the file that you write your drafts in. As usual, this code comes without any warranty.

" Call the function that will highlight the lines that are too long.
au BufNewFile,BufRead /home/peter/doc/twitter.txt call TwitterLineLengths()

highlight OverLength ctermbg=darkred ctermfg=white guibg=#FFD9D9

function! TwitterLineLengths()
    3match OverLength /\%141v.\+/
endfunction

Code based on code from Stackoverflow.

Spam on Twitter

A few months ago I said that it's not possible to spam Twitter. This is because you can choose who you follow. And people can't send messages to you if you don't follow them. This makes Twitter unspammable.

The above is still true, with the exception that with search.twitter.com people will find messages of people that they don't follow. This problems becomes bigger when people will start searching for their @usernames. If someone now tweets with a message containing your username it will appear in your client.

Today I say another way to make the same thing happen. Twitter generates a list of trending topics in the sidebar. These topics are links to the search engine. By clicking one of these links you will get a list of all tweets containing these search terms. The way to take advantage of this is to pick a word from the trending topics and write a tweet with those words. It will now appear in front of a lot of people.

Also see Mashable.