This idea dates to July 2 2008, when I first wrote it down, but I’m only publishing it today in response to O’Reily’s Why I Love Twitter post.
update: Twitter will be creating groups sometime soon, they say. This does not invalidate my idea, but decreases the chances of becoming popular.
I’ve been a fan of Twitter since I remember it. I check it several times per day and sometimes I wish I had it everywhere.
So, what’s Twitter?
Twitter’s a short-message broadcasting service. Each user can follow other users, and each time one of them sends a message, all his followers receive it1. It has a web interface, but there are several alternatives due to its simple API.
At some point of its history, Twitter introduced a SMS interface to its service, which allowed each user to receive up to 250 sms each week, one for each of his friends messages. This was an enormous success, so big they couldn’t afford the SMS’s and had to restrict the SMS api to a few countries.
Why would I want to make a Twitter clone?
I’m not happy with my usage of Twitter. I am following 467 people and being followed by even a few more. And among those 467 people there are groups. The webdesign guys, the programming folks, my colleagues, the politics gang, etc… People organize themselves in groups, and twitter does not care about that pattern.
So I propose a micro-blogging system based in groups. Anyone could create a new group and invite members. Messages would be sent to a group, and not to a person (although Direct Messages would exist also). It would work perfectly in Portugal, where everyone belongs to a few groups (the guys who you play football with, the guys you hang out at night, your co-workers, your family….)
Also, twitter a lot of web-based. Although I believe it is the future, in Portugal this isn’t true yet, and the SMS is a much better mean of communication than internet. We even have more than one mobile phone per capita!
Differences from Twitter
Well, in Twitter you meet people by side-conversations (someone you follow replies to that 3rd person you don’t know, but can follow), in my system it wouldn’t be possible. This is the major drawback I see.
The SMS format would have to be a bit more complex. Instead of “Hello everyone!”, you would have to type “FonsecaFamily: Hello everyone!” and the number of characters would have to be reduced having this in mind.
Marketing/Business Model.
This project would hardly be successful if implemented by a small company. I believe it would work if implemented by Vodafone (or YORN), TMN or Optimus (or Tag). If implemented by one operator, there would be a small SMS-related cost, but offering this service might bring new people over to their network.
If any other company wanted to launch this service, it would have to use advertising to pay for the SMS. Plain web advertising wouldn’t work because people would just use SMS. I believe the best model is the one Pownce2 implemented: In every X messages you receive, you get one extra, that it’s just ads. And this wouldn’t be any ads (or I wouldn’t believe in this). Since people create their profile in the website, they give their age/sex/location so we know what they’d like, and advertising doesn’t mean spam.
Hey, it’s an OpenSource idea!
I don’t have the time to build and launch this thing as it is required. So I opensource this idea for anyone that likes it and does believe in it.
1 To be more correct this only applies if you don’t have private updates, which is the majority of their user base. If you have a private profile, you have to manually accept each follower so he can see your updates.
2 Yeah, I’ve heard they closed/were acquired. Their problem was not the business model, but the fact they came after twitter.