Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?
August 11, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, Bleeding Edge, Featured Articles, Real-Time Web, Sharing, Social Media, Social Search, Startups
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
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I say ‘quite possibly so’ – though it’ll be a long road to get there. I say we’re headed towards a Federated real-time web, and Wordpress looks like it could be best positioned to take the helm of that ship.
Friendfeed (and their acquisition by Facebook) has been the topic of conversation here at SiliconANGLE as well as much of the blogosphere yesterday and today. I don’t doubt that this will continue for a while. Louis Gray probably best captured the emotional aspect for most of us early adopters who were on the system chatting away with the immediate family of the founders when it was just us:
Here's the thing. FriendFeed is the good girl. FriendFeed is the one that has a 4.0 GPA and had big dreams of an Ivy League diploma. And yet, she ends up with you - the Silicon Valley equivalent of your local state school. When you come rolling in with your heavy car, big wheels and pumping bass, we don't care how much money you say you're worth - we still don't trust your grin when you open the door and say "hop in".
The more I examine my thoughts and feelings on this, the more I keep coming back to one startling truth: I agree with Dave Winer.
We Need a Federated Real Time Web
I’m tired of constantly re-entering all of my information and accounts into services I start to care about, evangelize for, and enjoy only to have them radically changed either by cultural shifts, sales, closures or policy changes. I’ve gone from network to network over the last half a decade or so, and with increasing frequency, I’ve left not because I’ve outgrown a service, but because it’s left me in the dust.
I shifted my focus away from Twitter when Friendfeed showed real promise, and Twitter lacked stability and reliability. I left MySpace for Facebook when the only messages I received there were either from irate ex-girlfriends and spammers posting as porn stars. I ditched Facebook as a focus a number of times over the years, usually due to massive mangling of the UI, or their ill-advised attempts to montetize.
Every time any of these things have happened, it’s usually been a part of a larger movement of users away from these services. Sometimes I was leading the charge and sometimes I was following the crowd. The responses by these companies was always the same: “Come back! We’re more open now!”
When they say open, they mean to capitalize on the definition web geeks like Dave Winer established for the term, meaning that you can own your social graph and your data, or at least take it in and out of the system at will.
It never means that, though, or at least very rarely. It means, generally, that they’ve launched an API for developers, or that they’ve allowed you easier access to the delete button on the account, or some other feature or set of features that can be slowly buried in menus over time as the public outcry dies out.
The Upside: I Think We’re Going To Get a Federated Public Timeline (Like It or Not).
One of the theories I’ve been operating under for quite a while now is that Twitter is the backbone of “the public timeline” as we now know it. That, of course, could theoretically change if Facebook or Google stepped up to the plate in their respective forays into RTW, but as it now stands, Twitter is the current king of that hill.
Twitter is slowly evolving into a protocol, and less of a conversational tool. You can see it with the slow creep into your timeline of urls, #hashtags, location tags, @replies, and all manner of add on services. Everything is abbreviated, shortened, hyperlinked and otherwise made smaller to fit into the limitation that is 140 characters. It is to the point where you almost need a third party client just to make any sense of it.
This trend will not abate, and for the record, I think it’s a good thing. But the good times of forward and steady progress towards a fully Matrixed web will not last forever, at least not solely on Twitter.
The same thing that has bitten us Friendfeeders on the butt this week will eventually happen to us all on Twitter: they’ll sell out, strip down, screw up, or otherwise anger almost all of us with a major change to the service, and render it unusable.
It’s a virtual certainty. User revolts happen regularly on Facebook and Digg. They’ve happened a few times on Twitter and Friendfeed. At one point or another, the ‘big one’ will hit, and it’ll be over for most of us.
The developer community around Twitter is starting to realize this already. Jesse Stay, one of the most vocal individuals in the Twitter developer community, said as much on Facebook tonight.
When Facebook is being held up as a standard of stability and trust, you know your developer community is troubled.
How Will Federation of the Twitterstream Occur?
I see two potential paths towards federation trending right now (and one of them isn’t Laconica/Identica, though it may play a part).
Third party clients: The most popular way to access Twitter isn’t through the web interface – only 27% of Twitter users back in April chose to interact with it that way. Clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck wield an unruly amount of influence. Many of the third party clients also support other social networking platforms like Facebook.
These clients sit in the enviable position, or at least might soon sit there, of determining exactly what it is that most real time web users get to interact with. Seesmic, Tweetdeck and the top three or four iPhone Twitter clients could form a consortium and suddenly mirror everything that takes place on Twitter to a third party or federated platform – in essence deprecating Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop.
Wordpress: What might they syndicate to? Wordpress offers an attractive alternative. There are dozens of lifestreaming platforms emerging, and everyone seems ready to dub sites like Tumblr or Posterous as the natural successors to Friendfeed.
They might be, in the interim, but they have the same potential to fall by the wayside that Friendfeed and Twitter have. Wordpress, on the other hand, is a widely supported and completely open source tool. Neophytes and true codehackers alike love it.
They’ve not completely ignored lifestreaming, either. Mark Krynsky has noted a number of great themes and plugins for the purposes of lifestreaming built for Wordpress over at Lifestream Blog.
In working with Wordpress MU and Buddypress as I have over the last several weeks, I’ve noticed a few key things:
- Federated activity streams are on the product roadmap for Buddypress. This is huge, because BP allows all WPMU users (and soon to be all WP users) to set up their own niche social network around their blogging community.
- Wordpress has a number of great themes built for real time interaction. We use one of them here at SiliconANGLE for our editorial backchannel (/sabackchan).
- Data can already be easily imported and exported a number of ways with Wordpress.
These paths may converge as soon as six months down the road, or perhaps as much as a couple of years.
Wordpress, though, has been around and proven stable as a platform through it’s widespread and decentralized support. It could be those very same attributes that have given it success as a CMS that end up winning it the keys to the real-time kingdom.
Nice article. I am starting to feel this way too. On a related note, I should note that if you want to post to a self-hosted wordpress blog via e-mail, I recommend the postie plugin, which I maintain. For wordpress.com users, they have just recently added more post by e-mail features which are quite nice.
Interesting.
We were just discussing that topic a week or two ago here:
http://siliconangle.com/ver2/2009/07/28/why-is-...
Great post! It's intriguing to see how Wordpress is so viable with the utilization of Buddy Press. Will have to checkout the themes built for real time interaction.
The theme we use on /SAbackchan is a good place to start:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2
I suggest you take a look noserub.com.
Seems to me that the power is with the independent apps that allow us to read all the feeds without being confined to just one.
I hope you're right. I'd love to see a decentralized wordpress based real time web. I thought about P2 being part of that solution but there are many layers. Real time connectivity, identity portability between hubs or local social networks, and a way to pull them together into your own personal viewer.
What's the entry point for users into this federated stream? I'm with this. I think this is the way to go because I don't like how unreliable twitter is, the spam, the control, etc. But, I'm in the minority of people who can self-host their own blogs and modify the code, create my own plugins, etc.
What I think about are my highschool friends who are not programmers like I am, who follow me and their friends because they're on facebook. Facebook enables them to easily follow friends and update their friends. How do they enter the system? I see them as still being facebook and my self-hosted platform posting to facebook. They will then continue to see my posts. Same with twitter.
I think there means to do this exist, the biggest obstacle will be that experience hurdle, how to overcome discovery, how to make it easy to follow, how to make sure there's a trail of trust to make sure that spammers can't impersonate, how to make sure that conversation threads maintain their integrity with respect to time and participants. We need some designers weighing in on this.
I've given a lot of thought to this - I'll probably do some posts on this later if I can muster the energy (suffering from a lot of allergy issues at the moment!)...
Not everyone in this scenario needs to be a WP admin. I think that the setup would look a lot like the communities we have set up around blogs and info portals now - Blog writers / editors could function as the administrators of the system, and with a FidoNet / Federated style set up, the larger public timeline can pass through their systems.
In essence, the users would only need to know where their favorite network node was - and the geekier folks in the crowd would worry about the headache of running the local 'chapter of the network.'
Looking forward to your posts on these issues. I think for the time being, most people will continue to use twitter and facebook to get at my updates. In the future some other hub will become popular but regular users won't see it as such. The system should encourage these hubs to provide the user's data back to the user to make migration easier, a feature which, I think, many providers will balk at or will try to overcome by providing "value added" services for which data cannot be migrated.
Again, looking forward to your posts on these issues.
FidoNet
I remember how pleasant it felt to hear my 1200 baud modem automatically call at midnight into the next city to synch my bbs' fidonet messages.
It is an interesting idea. It would not be too difficult to set up a series of plugins (or one multi-plugin) to essentially do what FriendFeed does, which is to crawl a series of feeds for each person and pull the data in for republishing and commenting purposes.
The problem I see is one of subscriptions. How does the federation and sharing between sites work? How do I have a central view of data that is in a cloud form? The reason I like FriendFeed so much is the interface makes it easy for me to see and converse with other people. Having to jump between sites and interfaces to do that is a pain in the ass, and kills the utility of such a system.
Gee... are we are going to discuss "federated real time web" for a THIRD week on CobWEBs?;)
Kidding aside, you hit the nail on the head with this, "I’m tired of constantly re-entering all of my information and accounts into services I start to care about, evangelize for, and enjoy only to have them radically changed either by cultural shifts, sales, closures or policy changes." We all KNOW FriendFeed is now doomed, and yet we all run like Lemmings to the next solution... which will last a year or so.
The federation is the tough issue... I had planned on looking more deeply into it myself before I caught the fact that it was on the Buddypress roadmap already.
My head is a bit too cloudy to properly formulate my thoughts on this. I originally considered DB2DB syndication of the actual posts in everyone WP installation, but...
Buddypress activity streams, with syndicated summaries, leapt out at me as I was crawling thru the MU codex. For the most part, the Buddypress activity stream keeps track of all activity on an MU website. That activity stream could be synchronized to a central server (or set of servers) for re-use on all in-network systems.
Buddypress basically adds friend features to a multi-user blogging system, which is not what I need. But if you redefine each users "blog" on such a system as their aggregation of content from elsewhere, then you've got something.
Still, I don't quite grasp BP yet, so I'm hesitant to use it. It looks like it's trying to be a local version of Facebook or something.
If you were to set up each user's blog with a P2 style theme, and use tools like FeedWordPress to aggregate other sources, you have exactly what you're describing, pretty much.
Very good points. Eventually people will want to consolidate, and they are going to think twice before archiving their precious content with a service that could be purchased and shut down in a heartbeat.
The folks at Automattic are really smart. They have made very few mistakes so far, but have taken advantage of every opportunity. You're right. They are positioned very well indeed.
Having been off coffee for three months in prep for the birth of our 2nd child, when I recently had coffee again, I started buzzing and came up with the idea of Personal Brand Stewardship (PBS).
Basic concept is that in the age of the prototype (or permanent beta), we have a responsibility to manage our brand effectively across the open web.
Part of that responsibility is having full control and not give too much to one particular tool that is in the hands of others. Or another way of looking at that is, why should a particular hot destination get all the financial benefits from me using it and I get nothing in return.
Look at Winer's thoughts on Scoble and his lack of even getting a hat-tip for his Friendfeed evangelism.
As so, when you say Wordpress(.org) could be the successor, I get it and agree...for those at the bleeding edge.
My question is then. What's out there for the average punter?
I think you're focusing too closely on the here and now.
It's not ready to be the successor today as it stands - down the road, though, it's positioned to take up the mantle, particularly if the federated aspects of the activity stream on the BP side come into fruition...
... particularly considering that as far as geeky and complex systems go, it's pretty low maintenance, and as far as general user experiences go, it's the simplest thing in the world to leave a comment and interact with a blog.
i was looking at this earlier today - by the metrics that FF, FB, and Twitter judge themselves by, Wordpress.com knocks their dicks in the dirt completely, with over a billion unique users: http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
Something to ponder.
The main issue with Twitter, FB,FF etc is that its all in the hands one one company. Same is true of Google's attempts and wave if and when it does arrive. FB could create a wave like application using FF. But which would you use?
The attraction of a new social media built on the backbone of Buddy Press/ Wordpress comes from its independance. Its confederation. Let you be your server and just appear on other peoples sites. But if they go down, you are fine. Opera have this idea with their server in a browser. Of course it means you are always on, or you have an agent who is. A social media server rather than a webserver.
Jesse's comment about trust misses a vital issue, FB like Google seeks to know lots about you and has more of your personal data. Twitter does not.
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Good read, haven't had one of those in a while.
Keep cranking out awesome content and I'll be back for more!
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We'll certainly try!
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I'm surprised you didn't mention PubSubHubbub. This is open protocol web hook notification protocol that has the promise of eliminating polling of Atom and RSS feeds. WordPress could be the publish part of the equation, but the subscribe part, which is to say how you read others publications, is the real key. And I think you're right that the 3rd party Twitter UI products like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr hold the answer to that.
One thing is certain to me, though. Twitter will not rule the world, nor will any single site controlled by a small group of people. There's a saying on Wall Street, "Trees don't grow to the sky." And it's the same with sites. Look what happened to Compuserve. That is Twitter's future.
PubSubHubbub hasn't thrilled me yet, nor did Friendfeed's polling protocol. RSS is a great outlying protocol for transfer of information, but it isn't the core database, and that's where the real work has to take place for synchronization of wide swaths of data.
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i just love Twittering compared to blogging. i was a blog addict and now i am a Twitter addict.
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