Marc's Voice

Live Mesh could be Twitter’s Plan B or we might have to do it ourselves

Steve Gillmor’s post on Plan B in Techcrunch posits an angle that only an wizened old veteran can grok.

Microsoft’s Live Mesh is really Twitter’s Plan B. By focusing on where the value is for organized affinity groups, we - the people - can harness our power, monetize ourselves and sing “Kum bah yah” all the way to the bank.

But it won’t be just Microsoft that exists in this open mesh world of the future. Google ain’t going away and in the increasingly complicated chess game that’s unveiling itself in front of our eyes, every move and counter-strike we see plays into our hands - as we’re the folks who are getting monetized.

In the 60’s it took a Che Guevara poster and a march to rally the troops, nowadays it’s Twitter downtime. Microsoft may ‘appear’ to be the bad guys, but FriendFeed and 100’s of others WISH they could get the kind of lock-in Twitter has right now.

So unless we take an approach of redundancy and try and build the open mesh - together - all we’ll be doing is replacing yesterday’s Microsoft with tomorrow’s Twitter or Google.

I asked the FriendFeed guys for redundancy the other day on the Gillmor Gang show. I’m not sure if they understood what I was saying, but I truly believe that as long as we rely upon single vendors to do anything, we’re fucked. That’s Twitter’s Plan A.

Fred Wilson and Evan Williams would love it if developer’s stayed loyal to Twitter, put up with the downtime and waited for Evan to hire a new tech staff and rewrite Twitter from scratch.

What Gillmor is saying is that to do Twitter right it has to become part of a larger world order. An open mesh where Microsoft, Google and AOL - all contribute their family jewels, infrastructures and social graphs - so that the closed worlds of Facebook and MySpace become increasingly marginalized.

Google and Microsoft really have nothing to lose by opening up. Its MySpace and Facebook that will be ‘hurt’ (at least in old school mental terms.)

But we’re living in a new world now - and openness is the new black. So unless Twitter meshs in with the rest of us, and I’m not talking accessing their service via an API - I’m talking having a DNS-like backbone to inter-connect 100 Twitters together - then it’s just another form of lock-in.

IMHO

Steve and Robert Scoble identified two key features that they asked the FriendFeed guys to implement: track and XMPP. I’d add to that a DNS-like backbone to federate users across a wide range of inter-connected ‘Twitter-like’ services. That would scale up the coverage and provide us redundancy.

Steve Gillmor’s contrarian logic teaches us that what Ray Ozzie and his team are building with Live mesh is a virtualized platform which can empower affinity groups to monetize and hold power - like we’ve never seen before:

Mesh atomizes the Google, Facebook, and other social constructs into virtual devices that can be combined from the ground up to attack viral opportunities as they emerge.

That is the future folks.

Twitter can be part of it - or not. Ev’s choice. But we’re gonna do it anyway - with or without them.

If you’ve been through the gauntlet like me, Steve, Dan Farber and some of the other veterans on the Gillmor Gang - then you’ve seen our industry morph and evolve like some modern day equivalent of plankton.

We’re now at a juncture where everyone’s favorite open infrastructure is taking a beating. Do we stay loyal, decentralize it or look for something else - from FriendFeed or Google?

I say all of the above.

In the chaos that we’re building that becomes the open mesh, there are no single winners - ’cause I don’t think Evan Williams is hanging out in Dubai, Moscow or Singapore enough to do that.

But there ARE others who would LOVE to support some open protocols and standards that Twitter could create. If they were smart enough to do that. Or maybe FriendFeed IS smart enough.