Save Twitter with Open Source
The Twitter service has some major issues with customer satisfaction. Regular, unexpected outages are causing significant frustration for its users and many are wondering what can be done to escalate the discussion.
While I have no doubt that the Twitter engineers are brilliant, resource constraints and loss of objectivity can affect any software project. Sometimes you just need a fresh eye and some additional helping hands.
Many of the greatest minds in software development use Twitter on a daily basis. What if Twitter tapped into the power of its userbase to help fix its problems? What if Twitter opened up its source code and asked the community for help?
Twitter may be concerned about losing control of its source code; however, in my opinion, Twitter’s intellectual property is not where its power lies. The Twitter brand and its loyal following are the truly valuable parts of Twitter. The nuts and bolts of the service itself could easily be revealed without major harm from clones. I would submit WordPress.com as an example of a very successful service that suffers few consequences from making its source code publicly available.
Twitter’s major issues come from the backend, or “guts” of the service. If Twitter doesn’t feel that it can open up all of its source code, then perhaps making parts of the code available would be enough to get the help that’s needed. Many developers have suggested that the scalability issues stem from Twitter’s Ruby on Rails code. If this is true, I can understand how a rewrite would be a daunting task, but there are enough open-source coders out there to accomplish the task and do it quite well.
The Twit-Out may not be a great way to improve things with Twitter, but the idea has produced a very healthy discussion. All of these suggestions are coming into Twitter, but I’m not sure that Twitter’s listening. A frank discussion from the folks at Twitter would be appropriate at this time. This is my suggestion: open up the service and let us help you overcome your current challenges.
May 21 - First Annual “Twitter Love Day” « Mediaphyter - A Communications Cocktail said,
Wrote on May 19, 2008 @ 3:21 pm
[...] ideas. He took the concept of fixing Twitter a step or six further than I did and suggested that Twitter move to an open source model in order to help improve its stability. Whitley is someone with whom I am consistently impressed [...]
Twitter Love Day - A Proposal « Mediaphyter - A Communications Cocktail said,
Wrote on May 21, 2008 @ 6:56 am
[...] place. Several people suggested Twitter move away from its Ruby on Rails code base and move to the open source backend model that Shannon Whitley wrote [...]