Twitter Needs to Become More Open or Die

The thesis of former Twitter engineer Alex Payne is that all "walled garden" businesses will eventually see their walls "torn down"

By Mathew Ingram

Twitter needs to become more decentralized and open, says the company's former chief engineer, or it will eventually wither and die like other "walled garden" approaches to the Web. In a blog post, Alex Payne says he quit the company at the height of its success earlier this year because he wanted the service to become an open, distributed communications platform, but the startup's senior executives were more focused on building a business instead. It's a critical question that many technology companies have faced: open or closed? Open can fuel more growth, but closed can generate more revenue. As Payne describes it:

"Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized and that all businesses that build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down."

The former Twitter engineer says he understands the company's desire—and, in fact, its need—to develop a revenue-generating business rather than pursue his vision of becoming a decentralized communications network, because "there are precious few case studies in the business textbooks of decentralization yielding substantial, predictable, sustainable profits for a commercial entity." Although Payne doesn't mention it, a considerable amount of pressure is likely building on Twitter to generate revenue, if only because the company has raised more than $100 million in financing, and its backers no doubt want to see some return on that investment.

Crucial News Utility?

The former head of Twitter's platform team, however—who left to join a startup called BankSimple—says he has come to agree with those who see Twitter as having a higher calling: namely, to become a decentralized communications network for the digital age, or what Om has called a messaging bus for the real-time Web. We raised the issue in a post earlier this year of whether there needs to be more than one Twitter, in part as a result of the network's repeated downtime issues, but also because the service has grown to become such a crucial news delivery system for many people. As Payne puts it:

"The call for a decentralized Twitter speaks to deeper motives than profit: good engineering and social justice. Done right, a decentralized one-to-many communications mechanism could boast a resilience and efficiency that the current centralized Twitter does not. Decentralization isn't just a better architecture, it's an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing. At the very least, decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as e-mail. Now that would be a triumph of humanity."

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.