by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
We’re fast approaching the theoretical terminal velocity tipping point in the demise of Twitter — maybe? It’s one of those, I’ll know it when I see it types of things. But the key thing to focus on is there remains a narrow window of opportunity for someone to swoop in an eat Twitter’s lunch once and for all.
But whomever did it would have to be quick about it — you probably have months, not years, to get whatever it is you want to found out the door and in the virtual hands of the currently Twitter-using public.
At the moment, it’s possible that this window of opportunity will come and go, giving Elon Musk enough time to finally get his sea legs and come roaring back. He didn’t become the wealthiest man in the world by being totally incompetent. It’s just were in a chaotic moment between him buying Twitter and him turning things around for good.
Anyway. I still wish someone would do something with MY Twitter Killer idea.
But here, again, is a basic feature set of my daydream.
Groups
Everyone would have to create Groups, both Public and Private just to use the service. Everything would be found in Groups that individual users would create in an ad hoc manner for whatever they wanted to talk about. Groups would be attached to an individual User’s ID, so you could have multiple, redundant Groups about the same subject. This aids in scalability.
Managed Participation
One key element of a Group would be not everyone could contribute. Whenever you created a Group, you would be prompted to set participating requirements, like, say “Only Verified Users” or whatever. This also helps with scalability because even most popular Group, the ones viewed by potentially millions of people, would not become unmanageable
Threads
Inside of each Group, there would be Threads. These would be laid out like a blog. Subthreads would be a clickaway and set up in a similar fashion. This does away with the clunky threading of Usenet, which just isn’t practical anymore.
Posts
The Post would be the central component of the service. You would have a whole Webpage to work with. You could throw in anything you might otherwise put in a Webpage using a WYSIWYG editor.
Inline, Collaborative Editing
What’s interesting is, once a Post was published, there would be collaborative inline editing of that post by other Users — until, of course, you ran out of colors and a new Post was spawned in the Thread.
Absolutely no one cares or is listening to me. So, unless I win the PowerBall, all of this is a huge waste of time. But, as I keep saying, it is relaxing to keep solving different problems in this hypothetical service, even if it will never come into being.
