my name is mwd

As some of you might have noticed, in its effort to become a sustainable business, Twitter started trying to channel premium (i.e., paid for by someone else) content to people with their iPhone client, with somewhat disastrous results. Rather than trying to integrate the premium content nicely with all your favourite tweets, they slapped it on top of what you’re trying to read. Incredibly annoying. I’ve no objection at all to them trying to make sure Twitter generates revenue, but they really could have found a better way to do it (for example, how Twitterific slips the occasional ad into the twitter stream itself, but in a way that makes it clear which is which).

Well, you say, that’s okay, there’s loads of Twitter clients out there, I’ll just switch. And indeed I did. In fact, presumably enough of us did that a day or so later Twitter announced that they weren’t very keen on these other clients, and they were going to start clamping down on that sort of thing. Ah. So apparently now we’re going to have to do what the bosses at Twitter say if we’re to access all this content we generate.

I do want to stress that I’m totally on side with them that they need to make money. It is far from free for them to run Twitter, and they need to get a return on all the investment that’s been put in so people like us can use it essentially for free. However, I’m also only there because of the content, and how easy they make it for me to access that content. If that ease of access goes away, then I will too. I’d happily pay for access – I happily paid for Twitteriffic for the iPhone to save me from the Twitter app (which I’d paid for before when it was a third party app). But enforcing awful UIs on me isn’t going to work.

That said, we’re kinda locked in. Twitter’s value is that everyone is using this one service (just like Facebook) – so all the content I want to read is in one very convenient place. The same problem I have with Twitter could potentially exist in any Twitter alternative. If we moved to Stutter (made up name, I hope), the next Twitter, because today Stutter is nice and friendly, there would be nothing to prevent Stutter doing things we don’t like later on once they’ve gained the market enough to feel they’ve locked us all in.

Or is that the case?

For several years there’s been an alternative to Twitter called identi.ca, which is an open source microblogging platform, very much like Twitter (in 2008 it was very much like Twitter, now in 2011 it’s very much like Twitter in 2008, but I digress). If the open source software behind identi.ca was exactly the same as Twitter, then it wouldn’t be interesting – it’d just be another central hub subject to the same issues.

Although you can get the source for this alternative, the key value of the Twitter type service is where all your Tweets are held – it’s the content that has value after all. Twitter has that server, and even if you had the source code to Twitter you can’t control or change anything Twitter do. Twitter has the database with your Tweets in, it’s the Tweets that are valuable, not the source code. If you run the Twitter code on your own servers, then that still doesn’t get you anywhere as you still can’t access your own Tweets, let alone anyone else’s, with that server. This is where the identi.ca software gets interesting – it solves that problem.

With the statusnet software that identi.ca runs on, anyone can run a server, and you can follow any one on any server. So you can sign up to any microblogging site running the same software and still be able to follow your friends who chose to go with a different provider. The idea of having the content be open is built right in. And in the near future they plan to add a very easy path for you to migrate your content between providers too. Indeed, if you take this to its logical extreme, everyone can host their own servers, which means they control their own content. You’re no longer beholden to the shareholders of the site you chose to use.

Now, this all sounds like an ideal utopia, and all is good, and we can all get back to microblogging about what we had for dinner or how funny that cat is, but there’s a flaw here. Who will run the servers? Although the ability is there for anyone to do so, how many of Twitter’s users do you think could? I suspect a rather small number. So we end up in a place where actually most people sign up with identi.ca, putting all our eggs back in another basket. And just because the source is open it doesn’t mean it’s all right. Remember, what’s important is where your content is stored. If identi.ca turned off all their sharing access, they’d be like Twitter, with total control.

So what to do?

Well, for fun (surely you think it’s fun?) this morning I fired up an EC2 instance an set up my own statusnet node, and have started using that rather than identi.ca. So now I only need to trust that I don’t go rogue and lock myself out from my own microblogging messages about what funny cats I had for dinner. But what does that do for you? Well, you can ask yourself, do you trust me or identi.ca more? Or if not me, can you find a community geek to run a site for your group/organisation/company, and do you trust them more than identi.ca or any other statusnet running provider? Only by getting people to set up lots of servers can we move to a place where we can trust that access to our content will be at our behest and not that of the VCs/shareholders who run the company that runs the servers.

Identi.ca are doing a fantastic thing (just, to be fair, as Twitter are for the most part), and I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t trust them today. It’s the future – who do you trust in the long term with your content?

Hopefully this will all settle down soon, and we can go back to using Twitter without worry. But if not, then perhaps you want to look at identi.ca, and if you’re suitably talented (and suitably of mind to decide that server admin on a Sunday is “fun”) then perhaps you can set up your own. If not though, and you decide you trust me more than someone you don’t know to host your thoughts, then you can always head here and use the server I set up today. If enough people care, I can even finish setting it up properly :)