I really want to build an open twitter like network

I recently wrote a post about how I learnt a lesson in blogging from Dave Winer. Gist of it was that I was artificially limiting myself in blogging by refusing to publish posts that were quick thoughts. I took some time to reflect on why that was and realised that I enjoy segregating my content. Never mind that I'm terrible at making the choice after that; I just happen to enjoy thinking, short content goes to service A and long content goes to service B. I used to try and further split it across accounts and other services based on content type but then realised my thoughts were so fragmented that there was no value in it at all.

But I digress.

The fact is, there are two types of content that I can distinctly identify. Very quick thoughts that are short and can be counted by characters. And then anything more than that which can be counted by words. To give an idea of what the latter is, the first paragraph goes into the second category. The first two sentences, belong to the first category.

I do love the idea of a constant thought stream. But I also hate the idea of the closed platform that is Twitter. So I want something like it that belongs to the open web. Something that lets me view other people's thoughts streams which are hosted on their own infrastructure. This platform would let me like and reshare their content to my thought stream very much like how Twitter lets you like (until recently it was favourite), and retweet their content.

Sadly, I've explored this idea. I'll elaborate on it more. But the problem is that the web standards weren't built with the social web in mind. They weren't built with the idea that I could log into a service on my own site, and then interact with a version of the service hosted on another person's server. At least, that's what my research has shown.

Like I said. More to come on that later. For now, suffice to say, I am badly in want of such a twitter like open social network. I really want to be the one who builds that too.

Posted on January 11 2016 by Adnan Issadeen