A frightening idea: Twitter becomes the News System of the World

Over the weekend, Dave Winer posted his concerns (it "scares the bejesus" out of him) about Twitter and the apparent inertia that is carrying the microblogging service toward becoming the "News System of the World."

His concerns are two:

1. It's a tech-world thing, and that sector, he says, doesn't take criticism well.
2. It's a company, which means it can fail easier than a distributed system can.

This is basically the same message I gave in my presentation about Twitter to my colleagues at the News Service this morning. I told them that I don't trust Twitter, that I don't think it will last very long and that if it does, the level of spam and noise on the system will make it unusable unless:

1. Twitter adds a lot of features that make it less like Twitter and more like something else
2. Twitter gives us an option to pay to make the ads and spam stop
3. Everyone protects their Tweets and carefully chooses who they follow, which would effectively shut down any wide and inclusive conversations on the site (if those even exist now)

In the long run, I don't think Twitter will sustain. I think it will fade in to obscurity or change itself to become something that isn't the Twitter we know and love/hate. The fact that smarter people than I, like Dave Winer, believe that Twitter is becoming the News System of the World is a little frightening.

But I'm not the only scared one out there. In Winer's words:

We're going to wake up one day, probably very soon, and realize that this is the new News System of the World, it's no longer in the future, and it's going to be owned by one company -- and that is going to suck. Permalink to this paragraph

Related posts:

1. Why Dave Winer stopped worrying and learned to love the Fail Whale
2. Dave Winer: ‘I used to feel Twitter was exciting.’
3. Why hasn’t Twitter caught on with teens?
4. Twitter did it’s job for Bozeman today
5. The hubris of the paid news curator