Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

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So when he announced earlier this week that he was launching a new company called Small Picture and had a new product called Little Outliner, I was interested, even though I didn’t really understand what it was. So I called Winer up and asked him to describe what Little Outliner is and what it is designed to do — and there is a clear thread that connects this new service to the other things he has championed: namely, the idea of having control over one’s content, and of being fully open.

A browser-based notepad, but also much more

In a nutshell, Little Outliner is a kind of notepad, and it runs in a browser window so no software has to be installed, and it allows a user to keep notes or text content of any kind — but also allows them to structure that content in a number of ways, so that it becomes a kind of brainstorming tool. Says Winer:

“It’s basically a note-taking tool that becomes a writing tool. So if you’re a reporter, as you’re putting together a story, you might talk to a few people and take notes while you’re doing that, and maybe you do a little research and gather some quotes and put that in your outline — but the structure is malleable, it’s fluid, things just flow into it and you don’t have to worry about where you put them because where they are is easily changed.”

This kind of thing comes naturally to Winer, because he said he has been using some form of outliner ever since he first became a programmer. “People think, ‘Oh he’s the guy who started RSS, podcasting or blogging,’ but that’s not really what I do,” Winer said. “What I really do is outlining. It was my entry into the tech industry — I wasn’t even a programmer until I realized computers could be used for these things, and it’s still what I do to this day.”

In addition to being used as an organizational tool while programming (which Winer says he does with his new partner, Small Picture co-founder Kyle Shank), one potential use for Little Outliner is as a blogging tool, the former Weblogs.com founder says. The product as it currently exists is just an entry-level thing, Winer said — with more features to be added later, as users discover new uses for it. And one of those features will likely be integration with blogging platforms like WordPress (please see the disclosure statement below).

“I have a really incredible blogging system, far in advance of what anybody else uses, I’m pretty sure of that, and this gives me a way to deliver that to people on the terms that they want it. They want it in the browser, so now it’s in the browser — and now it’s about hooking it up in very simple ways to things that can take advantage of it, like WordPress. I want to integrate — that’s my religion: interoperability.”

Open standards and interoperability

While Little Outliner may seem competitive with other tools such as Evernote or Google’s new Keep service, Winer said it differs from these in two specific ways — the first being that it incorporates structure into the notes or content being saved. The second is that Winer is dedicated to keeping it as open as possible, in part so that users don’t suffer the same fate they did when Google shut down Google Reader. That’s why the content is stored locally on a user’s computer (although web sharing is coming) and it is based on OPML, an open standard.

“For some people, Keep will probably be a wonderful tool to use. If it were my type of tool, the questions I would ask would be the obvious ones in light of the Google Reader thing — what does the future look like, how open is it — if things were open, if you could replace them and their data was accessible to other pieces of software, then it wouldn’t matter if they withdrew. But if you have to worry about them dropping the product and they don’t make the data accessible to other pieces of software, you really don’t have any upside.”

Whether Little Outliner becomes a must-use product for millions or not, Winer’s dedication to open standards — which has included promoting the idea of a distributed version of Twitter, rather than relying on a proprietary platform owned by a single company — means that those who prefer open and interoperable web tools will always have an alternative.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito

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According to the Poynter.org blog, Costolo said:

We have known for a long time that when events happen in the real world, the shared experience is on Twitter and we want to create an ability to curate events.

In theory this tool could be used to add more context and allow the aggregated tweets to paint a better picture of what’s really going on, focusing on the narrative rather than the noise. Think Storify or Tweetmeme only without leaving Twitter itself. (The ONA conversation is here.)

Twitter and journalists: a love-hate affair

Costolo also promised that people will be able to download their full tweet stream by year’s end, a claim that took blogging pioneer Dave Winer by surprise since Twitter has started to exercise more control over the content that runs on its service. Winer wrote:

I was amazed by this. And I don’t believe it will ever happen, or if it does it will be in GIF format or PDF, some format that makes it virtually impossible to move the data somewhere else. It would be completely inconsistent for Twitter to offer freedom to its users when it’s paying such a high price in goodwill to take away that freedom.

As Winer’s words make clear, the relationship between journalists (and other users) that rely on Twitter and Twitter itself is getting complicated.  Some of Twitter’s actions raise questions about who owns the tweetstream, the people who create and post it or Twitter itself. And, the company ‘s new API, which initially affects third-party developers could end up impacting newspapers and blogs that use it to build Twitter-based features or services. As GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram put it:

[Twitter] moves to lock down its network and control more of the content have raised some hackles in the journalism community, however, even as Twitter expands on its partnerships with select media entities such as NBC and MTV — and those stress points are only going to increase as the company’s ambitions and desire for revenue continue to grow.

Twitter wants Brady

Twitter has also been a huge platform for celebrities or would-be celebrities to build their brand and connect with fans. (As an example, Lady Gaga has more than 29 million followers.

On a lighter note at the conference, Costolo was asked what celebrity he would most like to see on Twitter. He didn’t hesitate: It’s Tom Brady. It turns out that the New England Patriots quarterback and Costolo are both University of Michigan alums. (For what it’s worth, Brady’s supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen has been tweeting for some time.)

Tom Brady photo courtey of Keith Allison

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Even more interesting than what this former editor got right, however, are the things that he and almost every other visionary completely missed — and one of the most important was the way that the news industry would be transformed by social media. From blogs to Twitter, that transformation (or what Om has called the “democratization of distribution”) has probably been more disruptive than any other technological development since then, and it is one that many media entities still have not fully adapted to or taken advantage of.

Potts, a former technology writer for the Post, explains that managing editor Robert Kaiser was invited by Apple chief executive officer John Sculley to attend a conference in Japan about the future of digital media, and the memo (which Potts has posted on his site as a PDF) was his attempt to sum up what he learned for the newspaper’s senior managers. Much of what Kaiser says seems blindingly obvious now, but as Potts notes:

“This was 1992, when ‘going online’ meant connecting to services like Compuserve and Prodigy via slow, squeaky dial-up modems. PCs had just made a transition to color screens, laptops were still a novelty, cellular phones were rarer (and bricklike) and nobody but Tim Berners-Lee had heard of the World Wide Web.”

Digital media means more than paper on a screen

Kaiser talks about the massive advancements in computing power that the experts at the Japan conference were describing, including processors that would be able to handle billions of operations per second and new technologies that would allow computers to “take voice instructions” and even “read commands written on an electronic notepad.” All of those things have come to pass, of course, along with the “easy transmission and storage of large quantities of text, moving and still pictures.”

Potts then describes how he and some other Post staffers used the impetus of the memo to come up with early prototypes for a digital version of the paper, using Apple’s HyperCard software — and while the display is crude, the elements of what would become the newspaper’s pioneering WashingtonPost.com site (of which Potts was the co-founder) are all there, complete with images and links.

Kaiser’s memo undoubtedly helped push the Post towards the web, something both Graham and several other executives at the paper were early to recognize as a powerful force for journalism. And the Post chairman has continued to push for innovation, becoming an early proponent of Facebook — and a mentor to founder Mark Zuckerberg — and encouraging experiments like the Post‘s social-reading application for Facebook and its Trove news-recommendation engine, among others. As we’ve written before, the newspaper seems a lot more interested in pursuing these kinds of innovations than in erecting paywalls.

So Kaiser definitely got the emerging trends right. But the biggest thing that he and virtually every visionary missed was the impact of what would become known as “Web 2.0″ — that is, the revolution created by tools like blogging pioneer Dave Winer’s Radio Userland software and Blogger, which Evan Williams sold to Google before he went on to help launch another revolutionary social-media tool called Twitter. Between them, these two developments have done more to turn the world of traditional media on its head over the past two decades than any of the technological breakthroughs that Kaiser detailed in his memo.

Social media is a bigger disruption than faster processors

Not only did blogging lead to the emergence of some new-media powerhouses such as The Huffington Post, but the fact that the barriers to publishing had been permanently lowered allowed “the sources to go direct,” as Winer has described it. At first, only a few — such as billionaire media entrepreneur Mark Cuban — took advantage of this phenomenon to get their message out directly, without having to use the press as an intermediary; then the arrival of Twitter accelerated the process, as people like News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch took to the network to tell their side of the story.

But even more transformative than this was the way in which Twitter and blogs and other social-media tools like Facebook have permanently changed the relationship between the media and what Dan Gillmor has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” Instead of relying only on mainstream journalists to tell us what is going on in places like Egypt during the Arab Spring, we have been able to see and hear about those events directly from people who are experiencing them — thanks to the efforts of pioneering journalists such as National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin, and his use of Twitter as a crowdsourced newsroom.

These tools allow readers to essentially generate their own newspapers using tools like Flipboard and Prismatic or even just Twitter itself, instead of having to rely on an editor’s idea of what is important — in other words, they can get their news unfiltered. Unfortunately, just as many newspapers and other traditional media companies took over a decade to really appreciate what Kaiser was talking about in his memo, it has taken almost as long for them to even begin to take advantage of the evolution in media that social tools represent.

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Beneath all the sound and fury from developers, however, is a kernel of truth that Twitter would do well to consider: namely, that one of the reasons why external apps and services have been — and continue to be — such an important part of the company’s growth and success is that many of its own products are frequently underwhelming at best. If the point of the new API changes is to control more of the ecosystem and the Twitter experience, then the company had better make sure that experience is as good as it can possibly be, or it risks losing the very user base it is hoping to monetize, as others have in the past.

As Harry McCracken notes in a post at Techland, the description of the changes from consumer product lead Michael Sippey does a pretty poor job of explaining what kind of behavior Twitter is in favor of and what kind it isn’t, and it doesn’t really give users any kind of guidance at all when it comes to which apps or services they should feel comfortable using. The confusing table included in the post — with quadrants for different apps and abstract descriptions rather than names — obscured a lot more than it revealed, as highlighted by the fact that many people couldn’t tell whether Storify was one of the “good” apps or one of the bad ones and the director of platform Ryan Sarver was forced to try to clarify that with a tweet.

The new rules have their defenders, including some who argue that Twitter is at least providing some firm guidance for developers, since its attitude toward third-party apps and services has been the subject of a lot of fear and uncertainty. Others have made the point that placing limits on API use makes perfect sense for a company that is trying to generate revenue from its network, as opposed to giving every developer with an app a free ride, and that the limits are not onerous (although Bottlenose founder Nova Spivack argues that Twitter could actually make as much or more money by licensing the use of its API).

But while the limits on API use and the requirements for how Twitter can be used may not look extreme, the message behind them seems to be clear. As entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Dixon put it, ”If you make a Twitter client, you should stop and make something else.” Instapaper developer Marco Arment has a similar view of the changes, saying they are obviously designed to make it difficult for other services to make use of what Twitter sees as its core functionality, to the point where one clause about how tweets must be displayed even appears to threaten popular aggregation apps like Flipboard. As Arment put it:

“Apps cannot interleave chronological groups of Twitter posts with anything else. This is very broad and will bite more services and apps than you may expect. It’s probably the clause that caused the dispute with LinkedIn, and why Flipboard CEO Mike McCue just left Twitter’s board.”

Squashing third-party apps means pain for users

The fact that Flipboard and Tweetbot — a popular mobile client — and possibly even services like Storify are threatened by Twitter’s moves highlights an important point: The company claims that these changes are being made to provide a “consistent user experience,” implying that all it really wants is to save users from irritating or poorly designed services. But the reason why people use apps and services like Flipboard, Tweetbot and Hootsuite in the first place is that they provide something useful that Twitter doesn’t. How does throttling or even extinguishing those kinds of apps help users? Just like the decision to pull tweets out of Google search, users are the ones who ultimately seem to pay for these kinds of moves.

One of the things that makes Tweetbot appealing as a mobile Twitter client, at least to me, is that it is consistently faster and better designed than the official mobile app and has a number of useful features that Twitter’s app doesn’t. As more than one person has pointed out, the company’s mobile web app and even its regular website also leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability, and the iPad app and Mac OS X apps appear to be the redheaded stepchildren of the family: They get few (if any) updates, and in some cases they may not even meet Twitter’s new display and usage guidelines.

It’s true that relatively few people use third-party apps, and so some have argued the developer angst and outcry isn’t worth paying attention to. But if this rationale is taken far enough, it turns into a kind of “we can do whatever we want, and users will have to put up with it” attitude, and that could be very dangerous indeed. As I have argued before, MySpace and Digg are a examples of companies that put the demands of revenue generation and business models ahead of what their users wanted, and they paid the price. They may not have had third-party developers, but the outcome was the same.

In a debate with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who says Twitter is effectively telling developers to “drop dead,” Anil Dash argued that the company’s restrictions aren’t that different from what Apple has done with its app store and developer community. But unlike Twitter, Apple had a successful and attractive platform that developers were clamoring for access to. The platform Twitter is now trying to monetize would not have achieved much of its value if it wasn’t for the developers it is now spurning. Will it have the same value if they leave?

Furthermore, Apple’s focus has also always been on users and the user experience, and its requirements for developers — however draconian they seemed – have stemmed from that impulse. Twitter wants to portray its changes and restrictions in the same way, but it is a much harder argument to buy. It feels as though the company’s need to justify its $8 billion market value is taking precedence over everything else, and developers — and users — are getting caught in the crossfire.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa

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Williams says in his introductory blog post that Medium represents only “a sliver” of what he and his team have learned about publishing and how it needs to be reinvented. As he notes, the idea that anyone could publish their thoughts for free from anywhere and have people read them was seen as revolutionary when Blogger first started in 1999, but now that ability is taken for granted. So what comes next? Williams suggests in his post that collaboration and the crowdsourcing of quality content are two of the core principles that Medium is based on. As he puts it:

“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”

Pinterest-style collections, Digg-style voting

With all due respect, both of those concepts seem somewhat, well, obvious. What else is Pinterest but a collaboration platform that allows users to “pin,” or save, the things they like from around the web (primarily images)? The idea of crowdsourcing quality content through the votes of readers, meanwhile, was behind the rise of Digg and similar communities such as Reddit, and it also fuels much of the viral success of Tumblr. And while the Obvious founders say they want to make it easier for people to publish and share content, you could argue that Tumblr pretty much has a lock on that phenomenon.

There are other offerings based on the themes of curation and instant publishing as well: RebelMouse, which was launched recently by former Huffington Post technology whiz Paul Berry and his team, uses your social-networking activity to create a curated page of content that you can organize however you wish, while the Svbtle network arrived in March as a simplified blog platform with a stripped-down design.

Of course, both of the things Williams is famous for also looked either unnecessary or unimpressive, and in some cases both. Blogger was cool if you were a geek and wanted your own website, but it was far from obvious at the time that self-publishing was going to become something huge or crack open the media industry in a fundamental way. And Twitter looked so ephemeral (not to mention the ridiculous name) that many people dismissed it as a plaything for nerds that would never amount to anything. So as Aaron Levie of Box.net noted on Twitter, it doesn’t pay to underestimate Williams when it comes to this kind of thing.

When you look at Medium, which is still to some extent in invitation-only alpha mode (users can see content, but only a small group of invitees can create it), it looks a lot like a mashup of Pinterest and Tumblr. Like Pinterest, it focuses on the creation of collections that are based around certain topics or themes, such as “Been There. Loved That.” The design, which is clean and a lot easier on the eyes than most blogs or websites, works well with large photographs but not so well with submissions that are just text, which can look a little like a bad RSS reader.

Reinventing publishing for a stream-based world

As Josh Benton notes in a thoughtful post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, one of the things the platform does that is unlike both Blogger and Twitter is that it subverts the notion of the author as the most important thing about the content. While that personal aspect of publishing has been one of the core principles behind blogging — and Twitter has popularized the idea of a “personal brand” that journalists and content creators develop by connecting with their fans — Medium is focused more on the value of the content, regardless of who is producing it or voting on it.

Instead of a blog or collection showing whatever is the newest thing — the typical reverse-chronological format used by most blogs and publishing platforms — Medium sorts according to popularity, in much the same way that Digg does (in a similar way, tools like Prismatic sort items based in part on the social activity around that content). Is the combination of a topic focus and a voting system enough to make Medium something magical, in a way that will propel it beyond Pinterest and Tumblr and the growing cohort of other social-web tools and publishing platforms? I would hate to count it out, but I’m just not sure.

There’s no question that publishing needs to be reinvented for the social age, and in their own way services like BuzzFeed and the recently launched Branch (also incubated by Obvious Corp.) are trying to attack different aspects of that. Former Typepad executive and media theorist Anil Dash recently wrote on his blog about how much of the online publishing world is still stuck in the traditional “blog post” mindset, while all around us we are consuming content in streams — whether it’s our Twitter feed, Facebook updates or the curated feeds we get through tools like Flipboard.

Does Medium fit into that social-publishing, stream-based world? I suppose it does, although in some ways it feels like a mashup of all the other tools that are out there rather than something with a compelling feature of its own. It’s true that Twitter took a while to take shape — and even its own creators didn’t really know what they had until users started inventing new ways of using it. So is Medium the future of publishing? That’s hard to say, but it is certainly an interesting piece of an ongoing puzzle.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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In Godin’s post, the author and marketing guru says that the world Twitter is choosing to enter by making advertising revenue its primary concern — over and above the interests of its users — is the same world that TV inhabits. The real customers for a TV network or channel, he says, aren’t the users but the advertisers who pay to produce the content, and this same dynamic is present in the newspaper industry as well (which is one reason why the switch to being funded primarily by readers could be so disruptive for that business, as I argued in a recent post about the Financial Times and the New York Times).

Advertising gets in the way of serving users

The problem with a focus on advertising for someone like Twitter, Godin says, is that making what advertisers want the main priority will tend to distort the things the network does — in ways that could run counter to what readers want. As he puts it:

“If they relentlessly sell the attention of their users, they will have a misalignment as they maximize profit. The advertisers will want ever more attention, and the users will want to avoid those interruptions the advertisers are paying for. Tension will keep rising as users feel trapped by a medium with few substitutes that begins to charge an ever higher tax in the form of attention wasted.”

This is a dilemma that Facebook is having to confront as well: it has become hugely popular as a social network that allows people to connect with their friends, but the vast majority of its monetization strategy consists of trying to interrupt and/or take advantage of those connections to satisfy advertisers — something that could effectively poison the well for many users. Sir Martin Sorrel, chairman of advertising and marketing giant WPP Group, has wondered whether advertising as we know it is even compatible with socially-based networks, and others argue that ad models simply don’t suit what amount to communication platforms.

Godin’s solution is similar to Caldwell’s model for his new venture App.net: while Caldwell wants to make user and developer fees the primary revenue source for his network, Godin suggests that Twitter should charge users for a variety of features that only power users are likely to want — things like advanced analytics, verification (which some users have already been given, but only on a case-by-case basis decided by Twitter) or other enhancements. The core of Godin’s argument is that this would align Twitter’s interests and those of its users, which would turn out better for both:

“Every decision proposed will have to answer just one question: what makes our users happier? Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash.”

Is it better to have loyal users, or giant scale?

Dave Winer, meanwhile, argued in a recent post that Twitter should do the opposite of what Godin suggests: in other words, that it should seek out those power users or people with some kind of celebrity-style following (not necessarily TV or movie celebrities, but possibly technology thought leaders, he says) and offer them a revenue-sharing relationship. One of Winer’s key points is that much of the value in Twitter comes from those users, and therefore they deserve to benefit from the monetization of the value they are creating, in much the same way that YouTube has preferred partners.

Unless Twitter reaches out to try and retain these kinds of users, Winer argues, it could lose them to competing networks — whether it’s Google+ or other offerings that give them what they want (one would-be Twitter competitor, Status.net, got some mileage out of forming relationships with celebrity users, but it wasn’t enough to give the network much traction). In a Twitter conversation with me, Winer also made the point that his proposal isn’t contradictory to Godin’s, and that the network could both charge some users and pay others as part of a different monetization strategy. As Winer puts it in his post:

“Not all your users are the same. Some see their output stream as a work product. Something they care about, learn from, put love into, and use it as a way to gather ideas from others. For some people this will be considered enough of a product that they want to be paid for it.”

In a recent post on the virtues of being free — a post that was a response in part to Dalton Caldwell’s App.net proposal — Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson argued that the only way for networks like Twitter to reach the largest number of users, and thereby achieve the kind of scale they need to in order to become valuable businesses, is to be advertising supported. And he is probably right about that. But is scale the most important thing? And could the race to achieve that scale actually ruin the network?

Godin and others have a point when they argue that advertising has the potential to distort the relationship between a service and its users — and we’ve already seen hints of how that might play out, in the turmoil around Guy Adams and the suspension of his account after he criticized one of Twitter’s corporate partners. The benefit of the models proposed by Godin, Caldwell and Winer is that they would be as user-centric as possible, and therefore less likely to become distorted. But they would also sacrifice the scale Wilson refers to. Would the trade-off be worth it?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa

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Amid the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s future — which some say is aimed at restricting what developers can do with the real-time information network, in an attempt to monetize it more easily — a number of critics have proposed duplicating the network using open-source tools and principles. This idea, which has also been proposed in the past by blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer, seems to have a lot of merit: after all, if a short-messaging utility like Twitter is a useful service for society to have, then why not recreate it as an open-source project? The only problem is that others have tried to do exactly that, and have mostly failed to achieve any traction. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with Twitter.

The latest kerfuffle started with a blog post from Twitter’s director of consumer product Michael Sippey, who said that the service plans to tighten the restrictions on use of its API by third-party developers — an announcement that came on the same day that Twitter shut down a partnership with LinkedIn that allowed users of that service to cross-post tweets to their LinkedIn feed. This led to a number of critical comments from outside developers about the company’s treatment of them, a relationship that has been somewhat strained in the past, as Twitter has tried to control more and more of its ecosystem.

Would an open Twitter be feasible?

Among those complaints was a proposal from developer Brent Simmons, the creator of a popular RSS news-reader called NetNewsWire and a co-founder of Sepia Labs, creator of an app called Glassboard. Although Simmons said he hasn’t been involved in developing a Twitter app, he said the increasing restrictions and tone that the company was taking would make him think twice about doing so — and if he did have one, he would try to get other Twitter app developers together to come up with a way of duplicating the company’s network so they could replace it with an open one:

I would get in touch with other client developers and start talking about a way to do what Twitter does but that doesn’t require Twitter itself (or any specific company or service). Once we came to a consensus, then we’d add support for whatever-it-is to our apps… And then we’d promote the new thing, encourage people to use it, help it grow. Then drop Twitter some day — or wait till Twitter cuts off our apps.

Simmons points out that the technical elements required for a short-messaging service like Twitter, in which users can “follow” each other to get updates pushed to them, aren’t all that complicated (although the company might argue that it’s a lot more complicated when you get to hundreds of millions of users and have to handle billions of simultaneous tweets every few days). A service that did this wouldn’t be all that different from the way that RSS operates as a news-distribution format, Simmons said, and a simple OPML file could be used to handle subscribing or unsubscribing from different people.

It’s no coincidence that Simmons mentions RSS and OPML as solutions to this problem: Dave Winer, who pioneered both technologies in the early days of the web, has been building a system that is based on those protocols for some time. Winer has written often about the need to reclaim the ability to publish short messages from Twitter’s corporate control — both because it would be better as an open service, and because it would be less likely to suffer from the kind of outages that took the network down in the early years of its life, when Winer proposed a kind of “emergency broadcast system.”

Twitter’s network effects are pretty powerful

But would an open Twitter have a hope of actually becoming an alternative to the real thing? Maybe two or three years ago something like that could have worked, but Twitter is now a massive network with over 100 million active users, and that’s a pretty powerful reason why people would tend to keep using the existing service. Not only that, but Twitter can and likely would do whatever it could to stop a competitor from emerging, just as it tried to stifle entrepreneur Bill Gross’s attempt to build a competing network through his company UberMedia.

In addition to Winer’s efforts, one company already tried to build an open-source version of Twitter: Status.net developed a client and service called Identi.ca, which was based on a model similar to that of the blogging platform WordPress (see disclosure below) — users could run the software on their own servers and connect to the network that way, or they could use a hosted version run by Identi.ca. After a lack of uptake, apart from some die-hard programmers and the occasional celebrity, the company wound up pivoting to focus on a corporate information service similar to Yammer.

Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook that was funded through a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2010, has suffered a somewhat similar fate: it has been criticized for not developing quickly enough, and seems to be used primarily by hobbyists, and others for whom the principle of an open network is more important than whether anyone else uses it or not. In the end, many users don’t really seem to care whether a system or network is open or not — or at least not enough of them to make a difference.

Disclosure: Automattic (maker of WordPress.com) is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz

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In 2004, I left MRL ventures, the incubator where I had worked on Yelp. I wanted to build a service for people to share things they might buy. I originally envisioned this social shopping site as a a universal wish list, created by people browsing images of products and clicking “add” or “skip,” similar to the way Hot or Not worked.

I collaborated with Yaroslav Faybishenko, a brilliant software guy who was also working for a mysterious hedge fund in San Francisco to build an app that scraped items from Yahoo and Google shopping services. We quickly realized we had a problem. Shopping databases are full of non-inspirational items, such as car parts. There needed to be a way to get visually interesting items into the database.

My background was aggregation. I co-founded the first news aggregator, Moreover, in 1998, and I had worked on the RSS standard. But in a former career, I was an architect in the U.K., so I had a big list of design related sites that I wanted to aggregate from, but I wanted to be able to pick individual items.

At the same time, Joshua Schachter’s beautifully minimalist social bookmarking system, Delicious, had grown rapidly. The simplicity of sharing bookmark links puts Delicious right up there in the key steps towards the development of social platforms. Sharing bookmarks is similar to news aggregation, only the items are manually picked, or curated.

Text bookmarks are like headlines that link to a full item. For the design sites that I wanted to manually pick from, it seemed like a thumbnail image on one of the pictures on a page showing, say, a table could act like an image headline — a small thing that links to a bigger one. By parsing out all of the images on a page and resizing them, when a button was clicked in the browser, I could make every image become its own form submit button. Thus, by making the process of choosing an image headline one click and by combining this with the same process as Delicious, users could create visual bookmarks.

If the thumbnail headlines linked through to the site being bookmarked directly, there would be no permalink, which would severely reduce the share-ability of the links. For Wists, I created two sizes of thumbnails — a tiny one for the gallery and a medium one for the permalink. Pinterest also has two, but these are the same as the medium-sized thumbnail and the original image. This use of the original-sized image is part of the reason why the company has had so much trouble trouble with copyright laws, as it is the equivalent of taking the whole text of an article rather than a headline.

A history of grid sites

Visual bookmarks are the key publishing concept behind sites such as Pinterest, and the principal way to read what is published on these sites is the grid format image gallery. This is nothing new, but its use is profoundly important since the linear style of blogs and social networks has seemed so dominant until very recently.

One of the most important UI developments on the Web is Dave Winer’s concept of the “river of news” — a one dimensional stream of consciousness, a reverse chronological list of updates. This format became the norm for weblogs. And it is so ubiquitous today, that it seems obvious, which makes it difficult for people to see that this layout was actually an innovation. A river of news updates is the core UI component of Facebook and Twitter, which evolved from combining elements of aggregation (a feed of updates from all your friends) with the simplicity of blogging (type stuff in a form to publish to the Web).

The exception to the river was the grid view for image search or photo sharing sites, such as Flickr. Unlike text, which you read word by word, images can be “grocked” entirely at a glance. So a two dimensional grid view is more efficient than a one dimensional river.

Until the mid-2000s, most weblogs were based on text, having come from online diaries. For example, the gadget weblog, Gizmodo, had few images, when it launched. This is unthinkable today, and the increase in usage of images stems from the evolution of domain specific blogs, and particularly product blogs. Although there were grid-based sites before, the one that really defined the exact format was Jean Aw and Daniel Frysinger’s NotCot. For the layout of each item on NotCot, the site used the metaphor of a Polaroid photo with a note written in the space below the image.

Although a seemingly trivial distinction, grid sites have their distinct advantages and disadvantages over linear ones. They look pretty, but require scanning in two directions. This is not good for news, where you need to understand the timeline at a glance. However, for scanning thumbnails, a grid is particularly efficient. But even then, the success of such image-rich sites as Tumblr made people think that the river worked for everything. I suspect the key UX component of Tumblr’s success is the ease of sharing or reblogging. Also, in such a heterogeneous text/image environment, you can’t just have a grid.

This all sounds so nit-picky and anal, but the use of grids for visual sites is really important. When a Web service that is worth $1.5 billion and has millions of users consists of a few standard types of pages, the exact nature of those pages really matters.

Beneath the hood, Pinterest goes to extraordinary length to overcome a shortcoming in the HTML layout model — you can’t display items of different size, row by row, chronologically, without gaps in columns. By tracking coordinates for each item, Pinterest’s grid has items of different height, but fixed width, optimally arranged in a grid. This means that items which are oriented portrait, are larger and therefore more prominent. However, most product images (notably, apart from clothing) are landscape, so the Pinterest grid gives an unusually biased visual perspective and one that I don’t think is optimal. So although Pinterest has the most sophisticated evolution of the grid format, to date, it may not be the final one.

David Galbraith is an architect turned tech entrepreneur. He is the co-creator of RSS and co-founder of Moreover, Yelp, Mocoms and Curations.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Marcus Jeffrey.

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