Google: Cut to the Twitter chase
I wish Google would just go ahead and buy Twitter and put us out of our misery. I want Google to get it, not AOL or Yahoo or Microsoft. We know that Google can fix its problems, as it fixed Blogger’s. I’m not one of those who is bitter about Twitter’s outages. It’s new. It’s wildly popular. It’s fundamentally changing. It’s worth waiting for. Blogger, many of you will remember, was like that, too. It was crashing and infuriating constantly. Ev Williams kept it alive by sheer dint of will. Nick Denton got me to get my employers at Conde Nast to invest in the company and help save it once; if I’ve done anything worthwhile on the internet, that was it. So now Ev and company are pulling out their rubber bands and string once more. And once more, they have created something world-changing. So you know that Google will want it. I wish that Google would just go ahead and buy it.
May 25th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Will it last though? FriendFeed is ramping up and seems to be getting a lot of attention with all of Twitter’s issues of late. FWIW, Twiter has had issues since its inception.
May 25th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I hope Google doesn’t buy Twitter. I fear it would end up like Jaiku…forgotten.
May 25th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Google did purchase Twitter competitor Jaiku earlier this year. If Ev can pull off a stable Twitter, he’ll fetch a much higher price for it.
May 25th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
I don’t want anybody to “own” the short messaging/micro-blogging standard (nor any standard for that matter). Not Google, not M$, nor any Yahoo.
Rather than asking someone to exploit it for their profit, why not, in the spirit of the open-source community, suggest that some folks collaborate on an open standard? Such an open standard would not be dependent on a particular web site. It wouldn’t be at the mercy of a particular vendor. It could be readily implemented by every social networking host, portable internet device, and a range of other access points that nobody has thought of. That’s the way to build a better bird cage.
May 25th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Google should just by SocialThing - It’s much better than FriendFeed in my opinion - and beef it up.
May 25th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
oh, I can’t spell. Google should buy socialthing, not just walk ‘by’ them.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:51 am
I’m sorry adam, but SocialThing! should just die.
I wouldn’t mind Google buying Twitter and integrating it with Jaiku. Stability and a few extra features would be neat.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
SteveSgt says: “suggest that some folks collaborate on an open standard?”
Well, there *already* is a standard and Twitter uses it! (slightly modified). It’s called “Atom over XMPP.” (Disclaimer: I’m a co-author). Anyway, If you want to see discussion of what could be done in the future, see the proposed microblogging standard (an expansion on “Atom over HTTP” at: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/microblogging.html .
The problem here is not “standards.” Rather it is one of business models.
bob wyman
May 27th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I also second what was said about Jaiku. You remember what happened to Dodgeball? Dodgeball was everything Twitter was plus more until Google bought it and pretty much slowed development to a halt.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis thinks that only Google can fix Twitter’s woes. [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Just build a Flash 10-enabled P2P version of Twitter and get it over with.
http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/p2p-version-of-twitter-using-flash-10/
May 28th, 2008 at 7:38 am
[...] second was a post over at Technosailor taking issue with Jeff Jarvis’ view that the current problems of Twitter could be solved were they to be acquired by Yahoo Microsoft [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Yeah. Google did wonders for Dodgeball. The only consolation is that at least they haven’t killed it.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:33 am
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June 2nd, 2008 at 6:44 pm
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