What Twitter Really Is
Twitter is a distributed link-sharing system – much like reddit or digg are centralized link-sharing systems. Sure – much like it happens with facebook updates – sometimes people use those 140 characters to talk about something without linking to anything, but for the most part it’s links that keep twitter alive. In this regard, I would go as far as to say that twitter is somehow more similar to trackbacks (links) than to blogs (and content) themselves. Delicious, while we’re at it, is both distributed (my page) and centralized (the homepage). But neither the distributed nor the centralized features are much used to share links, which might as well explain why delicious slowly faded away as twitter started to soar…
30 marzo 2010 -- 4 commenti
The “faded away” sentence implies that this is a zero sum game, which it is not. Twitter can soar and grow without damaging at all Delicious and other bookmarking tools. They d do continue to speak and serve to an another audience. A smaller one, yes, but quite big on its own*
nda
* according to http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/11/delicious-is-5.html Delicious has at least 5 million users.
Hi Nicola, sure. And I personally use delicious and neither use nor like twitter. But it’s a fact that twitter has 10 times more users.
Massimo: when someone points out that Twitter has way more users than Delicious you can answer “It’s a signal vs noise thing, you wouldn’t understand”. ;-)
nda
Good point :)