Can Dalton Caldwell realize Jack Dorsey's original dream

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Jack Dorsey described how the idea of Twitter came to life. Dorsey had always been fascinated by cities and how they work. In particular, he “was fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio.“. What makes cities so intriguing is the invisible matrix, this strange organic order behind the chaos. I believe Dorsey dreamed of making this flow of information visible through an information network, Twitter.

The dream, an information network

When I started using Twitter in 2007, I was blown away by its sheer simplicity and by its potential. To me, it was not just a new kind of social network, it was the first implementation of a truly open information network.

I first encountered the concept of information networks in 2005 when I was a Java developer implementing a JMS-based Event-driven architecture . An event-driven system typically consists of event emitters (or agents) and event consumers (also called sinks). This architecture is based on the publish/subscribe pattern also known as the Observer pattern made popular by the famous Gang of Four Design Patterns first edited in 1994.

Twitter is basically a large Event-driven messaging platform where all nodes (i.e. Twitter users) are both emitters and consumers. The big novelty compared to traditional Enterprise software is that the bus is on the Internet, all messages are public, archived and searchable, and all nodes can be followed. This is huge. It means that potentially any machines or humans can become listeners of “events”. The messages being in the open, they can be processed in real-time or later in batch.

In the context of cities, sensing devices could detect state changes of surrounding objects and create events which can then be processed by a service or device (i.e. your phone or your car). This is at the core of what smart cities will become.

Twitter could have become the technology platform for smart cities and the Internet of Things.

The reality, the social media king

Instead of enabling machines to publish information, Twitter enables people to broadcast thoughts and news in a way that blogs could never do. Twitter is THE social media king where movie stars, professional football players and politicians express themselves. The impact on news is enormous. Getting back on the topic of machines, the vast majority of them are unfortunately annoying spam bots.

It is logical that Twitter displays ads to monetize its service. Other medias such as radio, newspapers and TV all use ads to generate revenue from their audience and the Twitter audience is massive. As I have already discussed in my previous post, twitter is in the tornado, Twitter is going to keep hurting third party developers as it needs to increase control over its user interface to maximize revenue generated by the promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.

So can Dalton realize Jack’s original dream?

In other words, can App.net become the missing information network?

By choosing an ad-free monetization path, App.net has the potential to become something other than social media. I am on app.net and today it really is a social network and looks a lot like the beginning of Twitter: simple, open and friendly. The community is small, people are interacting a lot with each other through mentions and you can make sense of its pulse through the Global stream.

To become an information network, other types of accounts would need to be created:

• Objects would be sub-accounts managed by developer accounts. They would be publishers of data and informations. Depending on the number of managed Objects, developers would belong to a different Tier.

• Listeners would be free accounts which are unable to publish. Your car would be listening to the city and its myriad of Objects.

I really believe the potential is enormous. An information network could solve BIG problems.

I hope Dalton is thinking about something like that. Comments welcome.