Earlier I posted a very brief post on how I got Twitter. Recently, Tim O’Reilly did the same.
The key insight, which I’ve made elsewhere while trying to explain the value of Twitter in one-on-one conversations, is this:
In many ways, Twitter is a re-incarnation of the old Unix philosophy of simple, cooperating tools. The essence of Twitter is its constraints, the things it doesn’t do, and the way that its core services aren’t bound to a particular interface.
I truly believe that Twitter, or something like it, will be looked upon as one of the essential tools of the internet, as transformational as email or RSS/Atom syndication: a universal utility. The only impediment is standardization, and that path would seem to lead through XMPP. Unlike a distributed service such as SMTP, Twitter’s utility relies on centralization of identity and service; an XMPP-based Twitter might have to arise out of a million internal corporate Twitter clones being exposed over the net via XMPP, in much the same way as external SMTP gateways eventually obliterated AOL’s walled garden approach to email. The race will be whether that outcome, facing many barriers, will come before Twitter itself is enshrined as a free public utility used to drive other business in the same way that Google search became a free service. Right now (as O’Reilly points out, Twitter has no credible competition which itself is a risk; if Twitter sits still, the walled garden becomes a fatal limitation since it will effectively become a bet against the internet.
Tangentially related to this, today I was reading MacroMates’s TextMate documentation and ran across this clear passage on the philosophies of TextMate:
From UNIX we get that Tasks and Trends Change. In concrete terms this means that instead of writing a command (in UNIX) to solve the problem at hand, we find the underlying pattern, write a command to solve problems of that type and then use that command in a script.
Connecting O’Reilly’s post to the TextMate/Unix philosophy, we see that Twitter, by design or by accident, solves problems corresponding to an underlying pattern encompassing user-extensibility, fast evolution, web transcendentalism, and simplicity.
The evolution of StockTwits as a social investing medium at a time when the market is punishing investors demonstrates the value of the principles the utility supports. StockTwits is a great Twitter hack, and it evolves quickly (e.g., after starting with ticker symbols prefaced with dollar signs, market updates get prefaced with double dollar signs; the filtering mechanisms inherent to Twitter eliminate the downsides of traditional first generation web-based stock discussion media).
If I had to describe Twitter, it would be “like useful ESP”. Or maybe more accurately: “like ESP, but with useful filters.”
Postscript: I’m on StockTwits as firebones…
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