Twitter Antihype From Lee Dryburgh

I am not attending the upcoming EComm conference, but it looks like Lee Dryburgh has really stuck his head into the Google Wave Koolaid punch bowl.

[via email]

Organiser Message

During the past few months, I’ve received growing requests for opinions on Twitter. However I’ve been taking the position for sometime now that my role is to help the communications innovation community grow and for it to have a globally heard voice, so I’ve remained fairly mute, preferring instead to give promote others wherever possible.

I’m pleased to say that the “eComm mission voice” is growing stronger – monthly - as more and more people come into contact with it and understand the long-term mission. I’ll not elaborate on that here, but in short, it’s to change the way humanity communicates and as part of that process to drive out the “telephone”. The telephone is not a suitable device/concept for the 21st Century. (The replacement is far more exciting and holds almost immeasurable opportunities)

[Actually, I think the telephone — particularly the cell phone — has a long long way to go.]

Yesterday after putting the descriptions of the three Google Wave talks live on the debut European site, I received two emails questioning the lack of Twitter exposure on the schedule. Let me answer that. In my personal opinion (which do not necessarily reflect that of those participating, sponsoring, promoting etc. the conference)…Twitter is old news. It’s probably the biggest single hype phenomenon I could cite right now. It’s not that I’ve got anything against it, far from it. Let me explain a little more.

[Lee thinks it’s hype, but doesn’t discuss features, adoption, or anything about the service.]

Back in early 2008 Twitter was exciting because it represented a new yet simple paradigm, which essentially was to make instant messages publically viewable and to link that with RSS subscription (and output to SMS if you wish). As a result we were honoured to have Blaine Cook (the Twitter developer at the time) give a talk. This was back at the debut event in Mountain View, which was also the first event to cover both the iPhone and Android. Interesting? Yes. To be applauded? Yes. “As big as the invention and introduction of the telegraph in the 19th century”? No, most certainly not, far from it.

[Twitter is last year’s news, I guess, Lee.]

Lets just nail this on the head. Twitter does not represent any new technology. It’s just the first micro-blogging tool. Again - there is no new technology behind it. Its just RSS, SMS. It’s a modern day IRC, probably best described as CSS meets RSS. Worse still, I’d question its centralised server architecture in terms of cost/scaling performance.

[Hmmm. What about the social impact?]

Yes it’s greatly lowered the barrier to IRC style chat (i.e. non-nerds use it, sorry IRC folks), that’s yet another of the reason it should be applauded. But lets have some sense and perspective.

To save against a torrent of emails coming my way if Twitter is sold for a high-value, I’m sure it will go for a high price, not owing to it’s technology in any way (as that’s fairly non-existent), but rather the sheer number of “captured” users (i.e. the namespace) and the ad/marketing potential of a large public conversational service (which has a time limit as other such conversational services will surely appear).

[Man, it sounds like real sour grapes. Was Lee involved in some earlier company that went bust?]

If people don’t understand the technical point, imagine for a moment another service with a huge user base was to offer an option similar to Twitter. Take Skype for example (completely fictitious AFAIK). Skype could in just a few lines of code, offer two types of chat, the current standard type and one Twitter-like. The Twitter-like one would be public would allow RSS syndication and offer SMS output. A few lines of code, no IPR problems AFAIK and better scaling/price performance. Hopefully I rest my case enough to allow me to move on. (Nudge to Skype to get developing, it’s a months work all in and would greatly increase the value of Skype).

[Bullshit. Twitter is a huge ecosystem, not just a few lines of code. This is idiotic.]

Now what Twitter may be prove to be is a forerunner (in a sense) of Google Wave. However Google Wave is new technology, it’s well thought out, engineered and architected. It’s far more likely to have a greater impact on the nature of Web conversation than Twitter, given time. If I were placing bets, I’d give it a 70% chance of having such a level of impact. Failing that, Google Wave will spur others to take parts of it, fork that out into different developments and ideas, which will then impact the nature of Web conversation greater than Twitter (in the long run).

Hopefully I’ve briefly outlined why this time I’m therefore honoured to have the team developing Google Wave arriving from Sydney.

Well.

Needless to say, I think it’s a bad idea for a conference organizer to get this deep in the weeds about the specifics of various technology players. In particular, while he may be trying to attract Google Wave hipsters, Lee is definitely not advertising his venue as a must-go event for the Twitterati.

Of course, that may be his plan: all the Twitterers are headed off to Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters event in LA (I’m speaking!) Oct 27-28 2009. He’s creating a rift to attract Google Wave fanciers.

I guess I think that an appeal to the features of Wave might have been a little more uplifting than pushing antihype about Twitter. Now I definitely don’t want to go to EComm.