Dave Winer Thinks Twitter Is Just Another App, But It’s Not

I think Dave is wrong in his premises about an explosion of Twitter clones:

[via Why there will be many Twitters (Scripting News)]

There’s a lot of money to be made in these networks and it costs so little to start one. An average Hollywood film costs two or three times as much as all the money Twitter, Inc. has raised so far. Spiderman 3 cost $258 million. That’s just one movie. And over time the cost will come way down. That’s why I suggested that FriendFeed get a clone ready, now — so they can do deals with the media companies when they’re ready. Which might happen any week now, if it hasn’t already happened.

Yes, Dave, Twitter is growing fast, and that’s the sizzle, not the costs in building a clone.

His mistakes his desires for a Twitter that he can twiddle with (“0. It starts as an exact Twitter clone. Command for command. Then see item #2. I get to completely redesign the UI.” from The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc) to some law of the universe.

The fact that Twitter now has 17 million users, and is growing, is the potentially uncatchable advantage that others can emulate.

And Twitter isn’t a movie, or a newspaper, or a desktop productivity tool. It’s not clear to me what analogy from the recent or distant past we should look to when thinking about Twitter, but it’s something more foundational. It’s like Unix.

Twitter is a great embodiment of a small set of principles that could define the future of social tools and the cultural norms that grow from them. The open follow model, streaming, and the micro format of 140 characters set a core baseline for functionality, and the open APIs invite others to create new applications and appliances that extend the core.

It took twenty years for Unix to spread from a research toy to the backplane of the world’s business servers. I bet it will take only five years for Twitter to grow into the backplane of the social web.

There may be others who fork off a new version of those principles — like the various versions of Unix that exist in the world — and at some point, a Linux incarnation might come along, an open source clone of Twitter, and that might make Dave and other DIY types happy.

In the meantime, the great majority of of will be happy running the Twitter equivalents of Unix commands, waiting for a new release, or installing new apps from others that build on and increase the value of Twitter.