Why there will be many Twitters
Yesterday I wrote about the Lotus 1-2-3 of twitters, but it may not be obvious why there will be more than one network of networks — so let me explain. — 1. Twitter is growing fast. — 2. Its use as a medium for news has become apparent.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer has been tracking Twitter since March 2007, when he asked how basic the service really was and sketched where it might go; by September he was arguing its lasting value lay in the payloads flowing through it rather than the messages themselves. This piece closes the loop on his 'Lotus 1-2-3 of twitters' framing from the day before, answering the obvious objection to the many-networks thesis.
The stakes are timing: Twitter is growing fast and its use as a news medium has become apparent — both confirmed on the record — which makes this exactly the moment when a category-defining lock-in would normally form. Whether one service captures it or the format escapes into many implementations is the question Winer is forcing readers to weigh.
First-order effects
- Twitter's confirmed growth and news-channel role mean media organizations are now treating the stream as a distribution medium, making their choice — bet on one network or support several — immediate rather than hypothetical.
- Any competitor can now copy a proven format instead of an unproven idea: with news usage demonstrating the model works, the barrier to launching a rival 'twitter' drops to engineering, not evangelism.
Second-order effects
- If Winer's network-of-networks framing holds, value migrates to whoever aggregates streams across services, pushing rivals toward interop rather than a head-on clone war against an incumbent riding a growth curve.
- Each new network would face the liquidity problem head-on — a smaller network is worth less per user — so entrants must differentiate on payload and purpose, the axis Winer flagged back in 2007, rather than on raw messaging parity.
Third-order effects
- The Lotus 1-2-3 analogy carries the structural claim: category-defining products lose lock-in once the underlying use case standardizes, so microblogging could fragment into specialized services the way spreadsheets fragmented after Lotus — though whether that happens is precisely what remains unproven about the thesis.
- If many twitters do emerge, the industry's default assumption that social networks are winner-take-all breaks, and attention shifts from owning the graph to owning the pipes and payloads that connect graphs.
The trend: Microblogging is at the fork Winer describes: consolidate around one fast-growing incumbent or federate into many interoperable networks, with Twitter's current growth deciding which way the category bends.