Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who has written a fascinating history of blogging (in time, we’ll be interviewing him about his book), recently wrote up his thoughts on Twitter in two posts: how Twitter differs from blogging, how it has changed blogging, and where he sees the platform going from here.
Basically, Rosenberg thinks that Twitter is encouraging long-form blogging, by providing an alternative platform for those who simply want to share links and pithy status updates with friends. On the other hand, all of Twitter’s interaction is “happening on one company’s server, in that company’s database. That poses some fierce technical problems if the Twitterverse keeps scaling up.”
And there are other problems: first of all, it’s difficult to access your own archive. Tweets have been permanently lost. And did we already mention that your archive is owned by one company?
Some people think that Twitter is destined to break and be replaced by an open protocol; whereas others hope that TwitterCorp will find a non-user-alienating way to make money.
In the end, Rosenberg is skeptical of claims that Twitter is a real “game-changer”, because the platform is neither open, nor all that revolutionary to begin with.
Here’s the link to the first post; and here’s the link to the second.
