Such a shame, but who knows if Twitter would still exist if they had tried the protocol route.
Twitter Could Have Been A Protocol
The logic goes something like this:
- Twitter is gaining widespread global adoption
- Twitter has an open API that is easy to develop
- Lots of apps are starting to use Twitter as a default ‘social exhaust’ system
- Tweets are a highly structured atomic unit
- Tweets can carry a link, meaning that almost any volume/format of information can be included in that atomic unit
- Unlike HTTP, Twitter is accessible to end users without techincal backgrounds.
- Tweets can be both public and private, allowing for different levels of ‘read’ permissions.
- Therefor, Twitter is a likely candidate to become a sort default communications protocol, where content is generated and consumed primarily by other applications but “piped” through Twitter.
They actually built it.
They had an experimental project called ‘annotations’ where you could attach 1k of json to each tweet, like a DIY microformat.
I got onto the beta and created a prototype twitter client which you could attach mini ‘apps’ to tweets based on the payload type, e.g. you could tweet out a poll, or an inviation to play a game or a job advert or whatever, and you could attach your own app as a listener.
The plug was pulled around the same time the 3rd party apps were shut down.
.. I remember reading a lot of articles about Twitter’s “platform vs. protocol” future around 2010. But the writing was on the wall when Dick Costello (former COO) took over – he and the board saw the platform path as more profitable. It was around this time they restricted API access too.