Day: 15 August 2009

Ten rules for Radical Innovators

I didn't blog Twitter's Ten Rules for Radical Innovators (found via @adew), because I think it was about the time of my blog being down. Umair Haque describes across 10 points why Twitter is changing the way we not only communicate but also innovate. Following the last blog post its good to point out that this is another reason why its critical that one company isn't going to rule this field no matter what their indentations may be at the time.

Interestingly the rules are actually good enough almost by themselves to create all types of dialogue around. We actually have a copy printed out on our wall in work. The Video above is Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque at the Next09 conference, where they talk about the money side of all this.

  1. Ideals beat strategies
  2. Open beats closed
  3. Connection beats transaction
  4. Simplicity beats complexity
  5. Neighborhoods beat networks
  6. Circuits beat channels
  7. Laziness beats business
  8. Public beats private
  9. Messy beats clean
  10. Good beats evil

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Too important for one company to rule the field

Thats how I generally feel about a lot of things. Microblogging included. Slate have a post (found via @tdobson via @technicalfault about the recent Twitter outage, which I've not really talked about too much yet.

Twitter is run by a single company in a single office building in San Francisco. When you send out a message, it flies about Twitter's servers and then alights in all your Twitter pals' cell phones and Tweetdecks. The system is fast and technologically simple, which helps explain its exponential growth.

But for Twitter, centralization is also a curse. In its early days, the site was known for its regular brokenness—its error-page logo, the “fail whale,” became a cultural shorthand for suckiness. Twitter went down so often because the idea behind Twitter—sending out short status updates to the world—became too popular for one company to handle.

I know Twitter's strategy is to connect everyone, but I don't see it. The big systems are interconnected with interoperable standards and work although on paper they wouldn't. Email, Newsgroups and the internet generally are good examples. All too important for one company to rule.

The rest of the post switches into looking towards alternatives. On one foot you got the open microblogging platforms such as Laconi.ca and Jaiku Engine. But then on the other you got the RSS extensions such as RSS Cloud and Google's new pubsubhubbub. Both approaches are valid and I can see room for both. I'd like to see pubsubhubbub in my desktop reader one day soon.

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