So, I’ve not got round to posting for a little while as I’ve been heading back up to Uni in Leeds and getting into the swing of lectures; plus nothing has hugely caught my attention in the tech world since my post on Google Voice.

I’m now well into the swing of my 3rd year lectures, which cover a wide range of subjects within CS, including Parallel Scientific Computing, Natural Language Processing, Visualization, ‘Big Problems’ and Distributed Systems.  It’s the Distributed Systems angle that I’m thinking about now, having read this post on TC about Twitter.  This guy’s idea is that Twitter should take a new direction and become a service rather than just a site.  He uses that analogy of email and MS Exchange, which apparently makes $2 Billion+ in revenue for Microsoft.  So organisations would be able to license the Twitter technology on their own hosting/servers and have more control over it and, crucially, be responsible themselves for its up-time.

I’ve thought through this, and I think it could work quite well for Twitter, if they could make it work.  I’ve always had reservations about Twitters long term potential.  They have had problems with downtime, there is a lot of spam throughout the network and a lot of people just don’t ‘get it’.  So while a number of companies have some  great success stories (Dell recently announced they had generated several million $s of profit through the site) this could all be based on some of the hype that currently surrounds Twitter, and may well not be sustainable.  Plus, they’re vulnerable to another site/service becoming the ‘latest thing’ (or doing what they do better), a bit like MySpace and Facebook. Don’t get me wrong though, Twitter may still turn out to be very successful (a number of investors will be hoping so, having made investments reportedly valuing the business at $1 Billion) but I think they have work to do and they really need to move forward, sort out the bugs/downtime etc and become more than just ‘a site’.  Decentralisation, as described in the post, may well be part of this, assuming businesses are happy to pay – we’ll just have to wait and see.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 12:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.