Eqentia

I was shocked to read that Twitter’s architecture is still centralized, after reading TC’s post where they advocate that it should be. I agree that it’s time for Twitter to take a page from Google’s massively decentralized architecture and to start showing us they can scale ad nauseam, just like Google. It’s a necessity.

Twitter is becoming a utility. I’ve already hinted at that in a previous blog post. Twitter will become the first, and largest Global Utility Company. Imagine if there was one global ISP company collecting our Internet fees centrally. The result would be a huge corporation.

Let’s face it. Twitter has failed to innovate beyond providing the basic service, and they will never be able to make a difference given the plethora of applications already here. They are distracting themselves by introducing overlapping features such as Lists, whereas they should be focused on strengthening their infrastructure, further enhancing their APIs, and figuring out a way to make money so they can continue to finance the growth of their infrastructure.

They can start to make money tomorrow by introducing an enterprise Twitter server version (as TC suggested). The analogy with email servers is perfect and right on. It follows the analogy of Virtual Private Networks and corporate Intranets. Some Twitter messages will be private, and others public, and the whole will flow seamlessly across firewalls. We should start talking about the “Public Twitter” and “Private Twitter”, just as we did of the public Internet and private Intranet. Twitter’s value lies in the critical mass of its users. A “Twitter inside” will boost the number of corporate users, and therefore Twitter’s overall value.

I’ve also argued they should limit the # of tweets per day or charge if a user wants to post more than 75-100 tweets per day. That would bracket businesses in the paid segment and wouldn’t take anything away, because 99% of users tweet less than 10/day. This would also curb the usage of some abusers and spammers, something that will raise the overall quality of Tweets.

I am betting on these two concepts and will predict they will happen: 1) Twitter- the Global Utility Company, 2) the Private Twitter vs. Public Twitter.

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