Musk Should Make Twitter a Protocol
If Musk is serious about creating a global public square he should let a thousand Twitters bloom.
Source: BacklinkO.
There are still some financial hurdles to clear, but it seems likely that Elon Musk will complete his acquisition of Twitter and make one of the largest global communication platforms into a private company again. Few people think this is a good idea, although Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey is one of them. Despite a staff of more than 7,000 employees (!), Twitter has struggled to grow, moderate its content, and deliver the returns investors demand. Musk has suggested he would open the company’s moderation standards and make the algorithm that elevates content open to public scrutiny. I would suggest going one step further: make Twitter an open communication protocol.
The idea isn’t mine, isn’t new, and would be impossible if Twitter were a public company beholden to investors. But as the property of the world’s richest man who sees the world as an engineering problem to be solved, this could be a huge benefit to mankind.
Indeed, back in 2019, then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried to do something similar. He formed an independent research group, called Bluesky, that would attempt to build a universal messaging protocol that would work with Twitter proper. As CNBC reported:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Tuesday the company is funding a new research team that will develop an “open and decentralized standard for social media,” in part to address some of the current problems with the platform. The idealistic long-term vision is to make disparate social media networks more like email, so that users could join different networks but still communicate with each other no matter which one they’re using.
Sounds pretty good right? The problem is that Bluesky has five developers. Under Elon’s rule, a lot more resources could go to his effort. Did you see above where I said Twitter has 7,000 employees?
Most People think of Twitter as their newsfeed, but it is actually a collection of services. Public tweets may be the common currency, but the service also provides private messaging, identity services, and a social graph that collects user interests for advertisers. This is how my fellow newsletter entrepreneur Ben Thompson illustrated Twitter’s system stack:
Thompson has suggested splitting the front-end consumer-focused services from the back-end infrastructure and social graph. By selling access to the latter, Twitter could enable innovations on the front end. Instead of one Twitter, a thousand Twitter-enabled messaging platforms could bloom. Thompson writes:
Step back a moment and think about the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet: we have a media protocol in HTTP/web, and a communications protocol in SMTP/email; what is missing is a notifications protocol. And yet, at the same time, if there is one lesson from mobile, it is just how important notifications are; a secondary consideration is how important identity is. If you can know how to reach someone, and have the means to do so, you are set, whether you be a critical service, an advertiser, or anything in-between. Twitter has the potential to fill that role: the ability to route short messages to a knowable endpoint accessible via a centralized directory has far more utility than political signaling and infighting.
Thompson, I think, rightly says the real value of Twitter is in the social graph. If Musk really wants to serve as the global public square, I say give it away.
There is history for this. When Twitter launched, there were a variety of front-end clients that hosted tweets - Tweetdeck, Tweetie, and even Twitterrific, which actually coined the term “tweet,” were all independent platforms. All of these, of course, needed to be bought or wiped out as Twitter moved to monetize through advertising.
Perhaps most importantly, there is a huge market need for such a service, There has been no real innovation in the chat space for years. I’m a huge fan of Slack, but it is still largely a walled garden. My efforts to set up an open, shared Machined Slack channel shows that it is still a walled garden whose walls are difficult to climb.
Pebble smartwatch founder, Eric Migicovsky, started a company called Beeper to try to solve the cross-platform messaging challenge. Beeper uses a protocol called Matrix to cross-post across platforms. For $6 a month you can cross message on multiple services, including:
Whatsapp
Facebook Messenger
iMessage
Android Messages (SMS)
Telegram
Twitter
Slack
Google Chat
Instagram
IRC (Libera.chat)
Matrix
Discord
Signal
LinkedIn
iMessage
(Unfortunately, cracking iMessage requires physically receiving an unlocked iPhone via mail--seriously.)
The problem with Beeper is that it is starting from scratch. Twitter’s user base is already over 200M.
As the world migrates to multiverses, we need a way to talk to each other across services. It is not an email and I’m not giving you my cell number. (Although, if you are a paying subscriber to Machined, let’s talk.) Twitter DMs are already one of the most effective tools for contacting people. The company has the building blocks for creating a decentralized, public square. Letting a thousand Twitters bloom would also sidestep some, but not all, of the moderation issues that have haunted the company. Terms of service could vary by client/application. Standards could also be set by region.
None of this gets around the fact that a global communication platform with 209M people on it will be controlled by a single, white male with an odd sense of humor. But if Twitter’s issues can be turned into an engineering problem, he is probably the guy to solve it.
Let me know if you agree in the comments!
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