Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 9th Jul 2012 23:15 UTC
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If a service like Twitter was invented 20 years ago, it would have been a decentralized service with an open protocol
What, kind of like Gopher? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Stagnation
There were BBSs, FidoNet, giving not totally unlike kinds of service - also with public messages. Usenet not far from that, too.
Thing is... they were a bit of a mess (and, partly also because of that, rather niche)
OTOH, some very centralised, similar in nature services did exist 20+ years ago (12:30 in http://archive.org/details/frenchtech1 ), and probably saw much more adoption.
Network effects (the people, societal kinds) partly promote centralised stuff.




Member since:
2006-05-04
If a service like Twitter was invented 20 years ago, it would have been a decentralized service with an open protocol. Everyone would be able to run his own twitter service and all those "twitter" servers would be able to communicate with each other.
These days every big company needs to have its own closed social network with its own proprietary protocols.