Lost, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Commons: A Semi-Modest Proposal | lost | lost live chat | lost live blogging | damon lindelof twitter lost party

Dear fellow “Lost” fans:

Hi there! Salivating for tonight’s show? Me too.

But I have a request. Please hear me out.

Like you, I’ve invested an embarrassingly substantial number of hours in this thing. And I can’t wait for one last season with Jack, Locke, et al. (Especially Locke. Can’t get enough Locke.)

But unlike some of you, I’m probably not going to be able to watch every show in real-time. Various life requirements are going to force me to watch at least some of these a day or two later on the DVR (or ABC.com or Hulu in a pinch).

Which would be fine, except that I’m also on Twitter a lot, and so are many of you. And many of you want to tweet about the show while it’s running and during its aftermath.

I don’t know why that is. I get the idea of Twittering along with live communal events like “American Idol” or pro football. But you guys realize that “Lost” episodes were taped months ago, right?

Anyway, I’m not here to judge! Just to ask for your help.

My ask: It’d be really great if you folks could lay off the “Lost” tweets until a few days after each show. Because otherwise, I–and, I suspect many other people, as well–will have to make an unpleasant choice: Stop using Twitter for several days a week or wade through lots and lots of spoilers. (This is apparently not a Hobbesian Choice but a Morton’s Fork. Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Yes, I think it’s theoretically possible for me to set up Twitter clients like Tweetdeck to strike some “Lost”-related tweets from my stream. But not all of them.

I also suppose we could also ask Biz Stone and crew to somehow filter out “Lost” tweets from the mainstream, but I think those guys have more important stuff to do. (One other alternative would be to ask all you Twittering real-time “Lost” watchers to head somewhere else for a bit, like Hot Potato, which is supposed to work for just this sort of thing. But I can understand if you’re not up for embracing yet another messaging service.)

So. What do you think ? I’m not asking for much, I think. Just a little near-term restraint. Let’s say two days, max.

That lets the rest of us catch up–remember, East Coasters, that the poor folks on the other side of the country are three hours behind to begin with. And then we can join the rest of you, and we can all discuss this awesome show in 140 or fewer characters.

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

Peter

P.S.: I bet the smoke monster is Jack’s dad. Or something.

Source Link: http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100202/lost-twitter-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons-a-semi-modest-proposal/?mod=googlenews

Tagged: Internet, MediaMemo, Peter Kafka, Twitter, blogs, digital, entertainment, media, television, video, ABC.com, American Idol, Biz Stone, client, DVR, East Coasters, episodes, Hobbesian Choice, Hot Potato, Hulu, Jack, Locke, Lost, messaging service, Morton's Fork, pro football, real-time, show, spoilers, TweetDeck, Tweets, Wikipedia, lost, lost live chat, lost live blogging, damon lindelof twitter, lost party

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Tearing down Twitter's walls | Twitter has become hugely popular | Open Source

Remember those crazy days of e-mail when you couldn't send messages between systems? Microsoft Mail customers could only send mail within their enterprise or to other customers of Microsoft Mail (ditto for the other systems). It wasn't until SMTP standardized things that e-mail could move between systems.

E-mail was interesting then, but it didn't really become dominant until it standardized around the SMTP messaging protocol.

Are we experiencing the same thing with Twitter?

Twitter has become hugely popular, but it remains a closed communication medium. Yes, it has opened its data stream and maintains an open API approach to its development, but Twitter is still a silo.

Yes, it's a big (and growing) silo, but then, so were AOL and Compuserve in their day.

There is a better way, and it's arguably the direction the industry is going to need to take for microblogging services like Twitter to become as big as e-mail. We need to standardize. We need an SMTP-like standard for microblogging.

And, frankly, we need an open-source implementation.

Open-source Sendmail was arguably the first messaging system to embrace SMTP. Sendmail gave would-be e-mail adopters a free (as in cost and freedom) e-mail system to explore, which led to Sendmail becoming the world's most popular message transfer agent.

Microblogging could use the same, and StatusNet's open-source micro-blogging software could well play that role. StatusNet is the company behind Identi.ca, the microblogging platform favored by the free and open-source crowd.

In terms of public blogging, Identi.ca is still more a curiosity than a real contender with Twitter. But, as in e-mail, it's probably not wise to underestimate the value of an open-source approach to standardizing microblogging intercommunications, particularly as microblogging enters the enterprise.

For example, enterprises that want to move beyond Twitter's one-size-fits-all approach to microblogging might prefer Yammer's microblogging-behind-the-firewall approach, an approach that StatusNet also offers. But StatusNet takes it further by enabling enterprises to set up a micro-blogging service that customers, employees, and partners could collaborate on. A private-public microblogging network, as it were, and completely based on open source and standards.

AOL once sat atop the consumer e-mail world, even as Twitter dominates microblogging today. Eventually, standards won out in e-mail. I expect we'll see much the same thing in microblogging. The question is, how long will it take?

Source: C.net

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