Creating Twitter Now / 04.28.08
I read a lot of blogs whether I want to or not for whatever reason and the past two weeks have been filled with a ton of Twitter news. You can hardly go anywhere on the geek web without someone praising the heavens for everything that is Twitter. But like every other superstar, geek, web 2.0 product it hasn’t hit the mainstream…yet. According to most people it will happen in due time, but Twitter has been out for over 2 years now if memory serves correct and do you see any sign of it breaking through?
We all waited for RSS to make its breakthrough, but unless I’m missing something that has yet to happen. What about del.icio.us and Flickr. Still minor players that are huge in our world. Either way all of this got me thinking what if someone were to create a Twitter clone now and targetted a different audience?
You would have the experience of seeing what made Twitter huge, plan for scalability and possibly add some new features and a revenue model. Absurd? Why? Don’t go for the geek crowd because how often do they play a role in making anything break into the mainstream? Think about it. The major hits of this web’s generation are:
Did any of them need geek cred to make it big? Nope. Hell most of them seemed to have actively avoided any contact with that audience for as long as possible.
So you go and make your Twitter clone, pimp it out to the Myspace crowd and you might have a goldmine in your hands. Sure the blogs will go crazy saying how you are nothing but a copycat and so what? Pownce and Jaiku are arguably better than Twitter, but they hit the same audience so their chances of success were always going to be small.
What about FriendFeed you say? Sure let them take Twitter’s audience along with the other people who use the sites that the mainstream world doesn’t use. If done properly I think someone could definitely leapfrog Twitter and be on their way to millions. Honestly when you think about what is needed to code up Twitter it doesn’t seem that complicated. The hard part obviously is the scaling. Take care of that, get the right people on board and there you go.
If you do decide to push forward because of what I have written all I do is ask for two things from you:
- A shoutout in the magazines that interview you.
- A revenue model.
4 Responses
Tyme White // April 28th, 2008
One of the things I am most grateful for with my audience is that they aren’t geeks.
RSS is pretty mainstream simply because it has been built into blogging software, social sites like Facebook and the browsers. People might not understand the technology behind it but they understand the ability to subscribe. Even Outlook and Thunderbird have RSS reading capabilities built in.
Most companies will not have the advantage of being pushed in-front of users across multiple applications, venues, genres, etc.
Paul Scrivens // April 28th, 2008
I’m not sure being built-in makes anything mainstream. How many features are built-in Word that is installed on millions of computers, but never get used?
Eli James // April 29th, 2008
Oh, that’s cute, that is. I never really understood Twitter, and I still don’ understand why it’s a geek thing - they don’t have any specific advertising targeted at that segment, don’t they? All that happened was SXSW … and poof! Geekdom much.
Michael Sherrin // May 9th, 2008
I think RSS has gotten mainstream and is in someways over used and other ways under used. All bookmark sites rely on RSS even when it doesn’t make sense. I can’t even organize my Yahoo! Pipes by tags - it’s all recently updated. On the other hand, many major content providers still don’t offer RSS or it’s all or nothing (with annoying partial feeds) leaving the reader challenges with how to, you know, read.