Twittering your Home
I had no sooner got finished writing "don't discount twitter. I'll lay odds that it gets hacked into a really useful service before long" in the comments on Nat's twittervision post, in response to the various people saying that twitter was drivel, and who cares …
Context & Ripple Effects
This post lands three days after a RIP Twitter obituary pronounced the young service dead, and squarely against confirmed sentiment among commenters on Nat's Twittervision post who dismissed Twitter as drivel. Tim O'Reilly stakes out the opposite position: the service's value won't be decided by its default use as status chatter.
The counter-evidence he points to is already in-house — his own experiment tweeting household events showed Twitter working as a lightweight message bus for physical devices rather than a toy, which is exactly the kind of repurposing his 'hacked into a really useful service' prediction bets on.
First-order effects
- The immediate fight is over framing: Twitter's perceived value now hinges on whether observers like the dismissive commenters or defenders like O'Reilly dominate the conversation around the service.
Second-order effects
- If developers keep treating Twitter's feed as plumbing for non-social uses — home monitoring being the demonstrated case — the product Twitter becomes is defined by third-party hacks more than by the company's own roadmap.
Third-order effects
- The pattern suggests early consumer web services get judged prematurely by their surface use case: obituary-style verdicts miss that a simple, open messaging primitive can be rebuilt into infrastructure by its user base, making 'what is this service for?' a question the ecosystem answers rather than the founder.
The trend: Minimal web services built on open feeds are being repurposed by their users from social novelty into general-purpose messaging infrastructure, with outside hacks — not the company — deciding what the platform is for.