On Dec. 18, the co-founder and current CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, shocked the internet after posting a tweet that he hired an independent team to reinvent Twitter.
This project has been dubbed Bluesky and it is exploring the possibility of changing Twitter to a standard-based protocol rather than a platform.
What does this mean? For people who don’t understand this kind of terminology, it can be hard to fully grasp what this tweet implies.
For example, Facebook Messenger is a messaging tool that is owned by a single company. In this case, it’s Facebook. Traditional email, however, is an open standardized set of protocols that includes simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP).
With this in mind, think of how email works. Nearly anyone can get an email server. Since few people want to run their own email servers, though, many companies offer just email addresses, such as Google and Yahoo.
Even most internet service providers give you an email upon signing up for their services.
However, the most important take-away from this analogy is that people can send emails to anyone regardless of the provider that they use.
For instance, people who use Gmail aren’t limited to just sending messages to others who use Gmail. They can send messages to anyone regardless of the email that they use.
With Facebook Messenger, though, people can only send messages to people who use that platform and have Facebook accounts. What if they don’t’ like or want to use Facebook?
They can use a different messaging app, but they can only message people who use that app.
There was a time when most of the internet behaved much more like email. Fast-forward to the end of 2019, and more companies are going the way of Facebook. It’s trying to get individuals to use only its platform. As such, it doesn’t want them to be able to communicate via other platforms.
What does all of this mean for the proposed changes to Twitter? Dorsey’s current proposal is to switch Twitter from a closed system like Facebook Messenger to an open protocol like email.
The move will put the power and control back into the hands of Twitter users. The goal is to improve the service and create a much more competitive marketplace.
While some people think that it’s nothing more than a marketing ploy, the possibilities that it could bring are endless, including the potential to use blockchains and cryptocurrency.
Such a business model could keep protocol sustainable without resorting to targeted ads or selling personal data.
At the very least, it could bring attention to some of the biggest complaints on the internet now, which are content moderation, competition and privacy concerns.
If what Dorsey is trying to achieve works, it could completely change how the internet runs and looks!
It may remove some of the biggest problems that people have while surfing the internet and using Facebook, Twitter and similar services.
Of course, there are also plenty of reasons why Dorsey’s proposed plan could fail.
Entertaining the idea that it could work, though, this change has the power to alter the control that large websites have over the internet.
