Imagine if the world of Instant Messaging had been under one roof, if one vendor had invented it, and had 100 percent market share. Further, what if that vendor had the foresight that there would be other vendors and that compatibility between their services would make a huge market, and that incompatibility would keep the market fragmented and relatively small. What would that vendor have done? - Dave Winer via Bookmarklet

Dave - I don't quite understand your argument for how Twitter could have been the NSOL of microblogging. Are you saying that Twitter should have been the site that binds every other micro-blogging service together? - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I don't understand your question, sorry. All I get from it is your first phrase that you don't understand me. So neither of us understand each other. Oh well. Maybe someone else can bridge the void.. - Dave Winer

Love it Dave. We're having a meta conversation about microblogging. Maybe I'll go craft an old fashioned blog post of my own to try and elaborate/clarify :) - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

It's kind of like this Apple commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Dave Winer

Exactly! - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Another example, I read somewhere on FF the other day that people took a feed from a music room here and added it to iTunes and it knew what to do with it! I feel really proud of that cause it was made possible by some early foundation work I did with RSS, a long time ago, paying off now for users. Exactly the kind of foresight I would like to see Twitter do now. - Dave Winer

Now that I get. Thanks Dave. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Dave, yes you spot on (once again !). However, twitter doing it is basically like asking like asking water to turn to honey. Only a miracle can make it happen. The underlying architecture of Twitter, really can't support a framework of collaborative sharing of info with other 3rd party vendors. FB did a great job with creating the app that was actually a platform. FF seems to be like this, twitter is ouf of the window. - Peter Dawson

Do you think the problem lies in the fact that they are a Valley startup that needs to look like something Google or Yahoo would buy and put ads on. - Harold Gilchrist via twhirl

Harold, I don't think there's a "problem" -- they're overworked and head-down and faced with an enormous amount of opportunity. It must be hard to sort through it all, and to them, a missive like this from me probably sounds pretty shrill. "Oh there he goes again." I don't blame them for this, but I would be remiss if I didn't put my stake in the ground so we can play Monday Morning Quarterback in 2010 or so. (Murphy-willing, knock wood!) - Dave Winer

Network Solutions are the worst company ever, i don't know why you related Twitter to them. - Nicholas James

I suspect that the problems from this past weekend are only going to exacerbate the problem. http://tinyurl.com/5pkpjs Not only have they missed they opportunity, but poor communication and support are seriously eroding the customer base. That the victims of this weekend's situation included several strong Twitter evangelists has unfortunate potential. Even tho the folks involved seem to mostly still carry a fondness for Twitter, their followers witnessed the problems and were involved in the solution. - Patricia F. Anderson

"Imagine if the world of Instant Messaging had been under one roof, if one vendor had invented it, and had 100 percent market share." Wasn't that *mostly* true of AOL, though? Didn't AOL consolidate their position by buying up ICQ? Didn't they drag their feet for years and years on efforts to make their IM play well with others? By illustrating your point with IM, perhaps you have explained why Twitter *isn't* kicking themselves. Perhaps in this game, the tendency is for the dominant player to *not* cooperate. - Karim

Likewise, Network Solutions is an example of *abuse* of a dominant position: in 1995 they charged $100 to register a domain name for 2 years, which led to an antitrust lawsuit. They've also been guilty of domain name censorship, domain name slamming, subdomain hijacking, domain name frontrunning, selling WHOIS information, etc. ad nauseam. - Karim

I, for one, am glad their business model didn't become IP of a namespace - Ross Mayfield

I'm really surprised that this weekend's problems of account closings haven't caused more of a fuss. It seems to me that it would be such a big deal, it would be the final straw that would get most of the major twitter advocates to finally pay attention to the whole issue of federation of microblogging. Also: this is the umptyzillionth thing that's made the thought go thru my mind that they must be *trying* to fail! - Tegan Dowling

@Karim: While AIM is definitely the dominant IM standard here in the US, it doesn't even come close to being so abroad. People I know in India and Australia, for example, don't even know what "AIM" is. Yahoo and MSN Messengers are both the dominant IM networks there. I think that Dave's example very much reflects why Twitter would have done better in the long-term with an open model. - Mohit

It would be great to see FriendFeed run their own laconica service (identi.ca). - Dan Cameron

Isn't Identi.ca exactly what you're looking for? FriendFeed doesn't support multiple instances of FriendFeed, but I'm already party of multiple Laconica (the source of Identi.ca) networks via one seamless interface. There are some kinks, sure, but I'm bowled over by how much they've gotten done in a month. - Marina Martin

Marina, I am an identi.ca user. How do I follow a user on another laconi.ca server? How do they follow me? Please post a pointer to the docs. This is very important. - Dave Winer

Dave, when you are on the profile page of a user on another laconica server (such as mine: http://waka.me/wil) just click on the Subscribe button. It will then ask you for your profile URL (yours would presumably be http://identi.ca/dave) then submit the form. Your browser will do an OAuth redirect dance, after which you should be subscribed to me. - Wil via MojiPage

Mohit, the market is badly fragmented *now.* QQ is huge in China. Yahoo! and MSN started beta testing interop only in 2006. Google whipped out their checkbook and paid AOL a billion dollars for interop, and even that is lame -- AIM users can't see GTalk users from AIM. My point was that AOL *used to be* the dominant IM, just as Network Solutions *used to be* the largest domain name registrar. History is replete with dominant players abusing their position, sometimes to their ruin. It is NOT replete with examples of companies that, experiencing massive growth, decide to share the load (and wealth) freely with others, even if that kind of behavior has the greatest benefit for society at large. Not saying it can't happen -- just that it *usually* doesn't work that way, as is made clear by the two examples Dave gave. IM and Network Solutions are two examples of groups collaborating only if they are dragged kicking, screaming, bribed and lawsuited to the table. I'm not sure why we should hope Twitter would - Karim

(continued) be different. Maybe "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." -- G.W.F. Hegel - Karim