Yesterday Twitter made a “small settings update” and removed the ability to receive your followers’ tweets in reply to people you aren’t following. Let’s say I’m following @bob, and @bob replies to @joe… previously I had the option of seeing this reply even if I wasn’t following @joe. That’s what Twitter removed yesterday.

Although Twitter claims this was an “undesirable and confusing option”, Twitter users have raised a big stink over this removal of functionality. (Currently three of the top ten Twitter trends pertain to this change.) Personally I found this feature useful as it gave me discoverability into the conversations of the people I am following. I wouldn’t be following them if I wasn’t interested in what they had to say.

But I write this not to debate the merits of this one feature. The real problem is having a single for-profit company like Twitter serving as overlord for a particular way that we use the Internet as a service.

Twitter, Micro-blogging, and Standards

Is Twitter standards-based? It depends what you mean. Take a look at twitter.com today and you’ll see an HTML page (with relatively few errors) served up via HTTP. RSS feeds are exposed throughout the site. Individual tweets have URLs. Looks pretty standards-based from that perspective, but it’s missing the forest for the trees.

Twitter provides a micro-blogging service, much in the same way that Yahoo! Mail provides an email service. But because email is a service that is standardized, you aren’t limited to one provider to use email on the Internet. If Microsoft buys out Yahoo! tomorrow (I know nothing about that by the way :) and you want to switch to GMail as a result, you’re free to do so… email is email regardless of where you get the service.

Standardization enables choice, which is why you don’t see Twitter trying to standardize the service that is micro-blogging. Then people wouldn’t be forced to go through Twitter in order to “tweet”.

Federation

Standardization is only half of it, though – federation is important as well. Continuing with the email example, there isn’t one big email server in the sky handling all the Internet’s email… there are thousands upon thousands of email servers hosting their own batch of users. Email is transmitted between these servers as needed. The TCP protocol that is the backbone of the Internet follow similar concepts.

In the email world I’m me@jasonmauer.com, but on Twitter I’m just @jasonmauer. This is like going back to the old Compuserve days before you could send and receive email outside the bounds of your BBS. Twitter doesn’t communicate directly with any other micro-blogging servers like Identica because it’s a walled garden of information.

Federation is also important from an architectural perspective – Twitter is a scalability nightmare scenario, just ask the fail whale. In short, there are good reasons for federation beyond enabling choice for users.

Business Model

Twitter is like a descendant of the dot-com Jurassic era that somehow survives today purely on venture capital funding and zero business model. Well that’s not entirely true… their business model basically like the underpants gnomes from South Park: (1) establish a platform and capture the community, then (2) something happens and (3) profit. Maybe it’s being bought out by another company (though they’ve avoided that to date), who knows. All that matters is that to them, you are there for them to make money off of your participation somehow. This wouldn’t be a bad thing were it not for the lack of choice users have, since they’re locked into Twitter’s walled garden.

Worth reading is Dave Winer’s post about why it’s time to break out of Twitter, using the phone company as an example of the problematic relationship between Twitter-the-service and Twitter-the-company.

Twitter and Community

My friend and community cat herder Dawn Foster posted on this topic about how Twitter doesn’t get community. Although I totally agree they aren’t getting it, I don’t believe the solution is to be found by Twitter hiring a community manager. It is the community that should be managing the service that Twitter currently controls. There is no micro-blogging without content and participation, and those are all supplied by the users.

What You Can Do, Fellow Geek?

The Internet ain’t what it used to be, with all these “normal” people using it. :) Maybe your parents are Twittering because they know people who are, or they saw it on CNN, but they may not have the technical background to see these issues with the service.  The tech savvy have a special responsibility to speak up and call out companies like Twitter when they pee in the pool.

My suggestion – don’t waste your energy calling for Twitter to restore the replies functionality they removed yesterday. Call for a micro-blogging standard that enables choice in service providers so users are put back in the driver’s seat.

One possibility is Activity Streams, which is a standard in development that Facebook is already supporting with their new Open Stream API. Please comment if you know of other efforts, have experience with Activity Streams, think I’m full of crap, etc. :)