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Twitter Is Just A Faster, Centralized Yet Unstructured USENET

Interesting thoughts, considering now.

Also: I suppose I’m dating myself by remembering that the first modem I used (yes, to try to hack into bulletin boards in the ’80s) was my best friend’s older brother’s 300/1200 baud. Good times.

gbattle:

Apparently, on August 22, 1991, at 2:23pm EST (exactly 18 years ago) I was commenting on the newest Metallica album on USENET. Wait, you’ve never heard of USENET? You never used that NNTP address your dialup ISP gave you in the 90’s (just the SMTP address for email)? Never played around on DejaNews before Google bought them? Don’t worry, most people didn’t and haven’t, but there is a cautionary tale to be learned from USENET discussion forums when making predictions regarding Twitter.

It dawned upon me today that Twitter is just a faster, centralized, unstructured version of USENET. Apparently, many smart people beat me to this same realization eons ago.

There are many parallels between the two:

public discussion forum

constantly streaming information

short term memory/limited data retention

ubiquitous access

multiple clients across all operating systems

unmoderated discussions

message size constraint

What’s more interesting are the differences in what USENET offers:

logical taxonomy of conversational topics organized into newsgroups

asynchronous decentralized multi-node mesh of servers (like email)

each mesh-node can deterine its own level of data retention

threaded discussion groups with attribution

multiple levels of identity, including complete anonymity

open protocol, not an API (again, like email)

optional moderated discussion areas

client independent filtering methodology

subscription to newsgroups and threaded discussions over individuals

larger message size contraint allows for multi-part binary file transfers

But Twitter has some magic all its own:

“real-time”* delivery

SMS connectivity

centralized search

unstructured format allows developers the freedom to build new, more structured ecosystems upon it

full unicode implementation (often overlooked and underappreciated)

All of this got me wondering if someone ever considered writing a Twitter to USENET bridge to facilitate distributed storage of the Twitter corpus. As it stands now, Twitter’s memory via search is woefully limited. With distributed deep storage, there could be a whole new level of innovation on the deep memory of Twitter.

From the other direction, if somebody added an XMPP** layer on top of USENET, pushing it into a realtime distributed mesh, that could be a powerful open competitor to Twitter with a taxonomy.

All in all, a few early thoughts on USENET and Twitter. More to come.

* it isn’t real-time

** this is much closer to real-time

(Note: I could have said Twitter is just a big BBS, but that would only date me even more than the 1200 baud modem I used back then to connect to them.)