Twitter-Free Fridays Are Stupid
posted by Toby Boudreaux 
on July 18, 2008 at 12:10 PM
Toby Boudreaux
CTO : New York
topics: Mobile, Alcoholic Beverages, Ruby on Rails, Microsites and Minisites, and Microsoft
I read an explanation of “Twitter-Free Friday” on Raster Web this morning, and it inspired in me a kind of knee-jerk vitriol usually reserved for conservative bloggers.
Twitter is a monopoly. Just like Microsoft was and Google is. And any time you rely on one single entity for something, that’s bad news. Even worse news if it’s something you need or really want, because at some point, after you are hooked, they will screw it up, and you’ll have no alternative.
With the original Microsoft-Free Friday by Dave Winer, the goal was to punish Microsoft for their abuse of their power in one segment (OS penetration and OEM channels) inside another segment (browser penetration). This was a trust issue, and a monopoly issue. Microsoft, by leveraging the walled gardens of their operating system made it practically impossible for competition to exist. The DOJ took note.
The person who dreamt up “Twitter-Free Fridays” seems to have a definition for “monopoly” that is far looser than that of the DOJ. My guess is that they found a palatable one-liner in a dictionary and assumed they were sufficiently armed to make legal judgments.
Being at the top of an emerging market segment does not constitute a monopoly. Unfair practices, abuses of that dominance to limit fair access to resources and outlets – those are monopolistic. If Twitter struck a deal with Mozilla that blacklisted other microblogging services, we’d have something to talk about. Opening APIs freely and allowing supplemental markets to emerge hardly seems consistent with railroad barons.
Twitter isn’t a monopoly. There are no trust issues. They are, by some metrics, the top dog in microblogging, but many competitors exist and thrive in an equal opportunity environment.
Are we going to start casually redefining unfair advantage in the scope of “social” applications as any user base larger than an arbitrary number?
Is the misunderstanding of monopolistic practice going to lead to an organized backlash against any entrepreneurial start up lasting beyond their first round of funding? Will there be exceptions for those who adopt the “blessed” techno-despotism implied by the half-baked Data Portability “movement” or its half dozen sibling groups?
The reason trusts are illegal, that monopolistic abuse is illegal, is that it stifles markets and hurts consumers. Beating up on the current leader because they don’t use a library or microformat or federated architecture you like – or because they’re popular – leads to the same end result.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I am all for the market crushing a business if the business deserves it. And I believe it’s up to the market to decide who deserves what.
Still, rather than negative whiny bullshit, if the market demands a federated microblogging system, I’d rather see AFFIRMATIVE SUPPORT for the competition instead of NEGATIVE DAMNATION of perfectly honest, viable, useful services. Pimp Identi.ca all you want! Sing its praises. But do it without acting like a baby and lobbing very powerful words (that you don’t understand) around.
The type of misapplied armchair thought leadership embodied in the “Twitter-Free Friday” effort is the type of thing that spreads from one nobody blog to the next until there’s a monopolization of communication: the noise having a clear and present advantage over signal, stifling meaningful discussion entirely.
I hereby claim Mondays as “Blogwhore Chicken Little Idiot Free.”
On Tuesdays, we can talk about carving out a market segment for federated microblogging systems. Tuesdays will be for productivity, meaning, value.
See you next week.
2 comments
Is it really "negative whiny bullshit" to suggest that people go one day out of the week without using a particular service, to see what happens? I'm pretty sure 95% of the people who use Twitter do not rely on it for survival of themselves or their businesses.
Anyway, I'm guessing you won't be joining us for any future Twitter-Free Fridays, and you know what? That's just fine... It's not about forcing people to do something, it's about trying to make people think about the services they use, and how they rely on them, and how that reliance can be affected by thing like outages, or changes of ToS, or whatever.
Peace...