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