In Jack’s vision, information is like blood, pumped to every corner of the Internet by the blockchain.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “ Geek Park ” (ID: geekpark) by Jesse.
13-year-old Twitter wants to go back in time. CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that the company would support a research and development team to design an open, decentralized social media standard called Blue Sky.
Creating an open and free information blue sky is the earliest vision of Twitter and the common dream of several founders, but the pressure of the capital world has made Twitter and this road gradually drifted away.
Sound for Earth
Before 2012, Twitter was also a utopian.
A short 140-character content, @ anyone can start a conversation … Twitter has changed the way people post, get information, and communicate, and even the concept of “news.” In the era when the mobile internet was not yet widespread, users could already tweet through mobile phone text messages and share everything that happened to them.
Evan Williams, founder and early CEO, wants Twitter to be the “pulse of the planet” and to record everything that happens on this planet. So he designed Twitter as a completely open information platform. Twitter has various open APIs (application interfaces). Developers can access information on Twitter at will through these interfaces, design their own clients, and analyze certain topics. Trends on Twitter and predict future trends.
At the time, someone compared Twitter to “the playground for independent developers.” Because you don’t need to have any commercial cooperation with Twitter, you can easily call the core data of Twitter to develop clients, search engines or content.Aggregation application. Soon, third-party Twitter clients such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific became the first successful independent iOS apps.
This is a lively platform. Users can share everything instantly, and developers can freely use this information to present them in a variety of ways. Twitter ’s user base has grown rapidly, and it quickly broke through the tens of millions.
Twitter ｜ Visual China
In 2009, Evan Williams set a goal for Twitter with 1 billion users. He believes that if one in six users in this world share everything around them via Twitter, this blue bird can represent the earth, make the voice of the earth, and beat with the pulse of the earth.
But things go against. With the great development of the application ecology, the success of some third-party applications has even masked the light of Twitter itself. In 2010, the board put pressure on Evan Williams, who forced him to step down as CEO. Later, Twitter studied Facebook and tried to transform itself into a social media company with “advertising” as its core business.
Since 2012, Twitter has gradually tightened the platform ’s various APIs and set up the number of users for third-party applications. In the next few years, Twitter blocked a large number of APIs by various means, which caused the functions of third-party applications to be gradually paralyzed, and users were forced to migrate to the official Twitter app.
In the first few years of the strategic shift, Twitter ’s performance has improved a lot. The return of users brought more advertising revenue to Twitter, but the entire community gradually lost its original vitality. Since 2015, Twitter’s user growth has almost stagnated. For the past 4 years, Twitter’s monthly active users have been hovering in the early 300 million order of magnitude, and this year has seen a downward trend again. During the same period, the total number of Facebook users increased from 1.6 billion to 2.4 billion.
In February this year, Twitter announced that it would no longer announce monthly active users.
Back to the past
Jack Dorsey wants to change everything with blockchain.
Inspired by Mike Masnick, the founder of tech blog Techdirt, he believes that Internet standards should not be set by “platforms”, but should be negotiated by multiple parties to reach an “agreement”. The platform is centralized and easily dominated by a small number of decision makers and capital; the agreement is decentralized and will not be easily destroyed after it is reached. And the technology that can best implement “decentralization” is the blockchain.
Twitter will establish an independent development team to shape the future of social media standards. They named the project Blue Sky. CTO Parag Agrawal is looking for a person who can lead the project, who will form a small team of up to five people.
The intention of the management is very clear, they are looking for someone who has “rich working experience in the blockchain field”, saying that blockchain technology can help decentralized communities to achieve “open and durable content hosting, governance and currency Into. ” In such a decentralized community, content data belongs to all users and will not be lost because of the fate of a company. And they can also build a secure payment system based on the framework of the blockchain.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey ｜ Visual China
The idea of using blockchain to build a social platform is not Twitter’s first initiative. Prior to this, several social media and IM chat software based on blockchain technology, including Mastodon, came out. The biggest problem they face in the operation process is the lack of an effective content supervision mechanism, and the platform quickly becomes a distribution center for various malicious and harmful information. Twitter, with years of experience operating content platforms, may be able to solve this problem.
Jack Dorsey said that if Blue Sky can finally be viable and popularized, everyone will benefit from it. “We will be able to communicate in a larger dimension and focus on creating an open content recommendation algorithm to help People communicate healthily.
Blue Sky is still in a very early concept stage, and it takes at least a few years of development time to reach the final product. After the development is completed, how to promote it will become a bigger problem.But Twitter is cultivating an opportunity, an opportunity to return to its origin and start again. In the new parallel universe, Twitter is not just a bird like its logo, but it will open up a vast blue sky.
In Dorsey’s vision, a decentralized social media protocol can connect the fragmented social platforms. Content will flow freely between different platforms, and users can easily forward content on Twitter to Facebook, or on Facebook @any Twitter user. Users, platforms, and developers will all benefit from this huge content framework.
In this framework, information is like blood, which is pumped to every corner of the Internet by the blockchain, becoming the “pulse of the earth”, realizing the ideals of Twitter at the beginning.