Twitter Faces Ramifications of Not Being Global

Peter Brantley
August 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Twitter, the microblogging service, has had an uneven rollout of an economic model, and was never able to come to good terms on payments for instant messaging (SMS) through its application with mobile carriers abroad. Consequently, it has limited its instant message functionality to North America. On his blog, White African, Erik Hersman talks about the ramifications when you try to be global, and then can't:

In our globally connected world, if your service can't cover the globe, then you need to open it up for communication between similar services. What we really need is a platform that allows Twitter-like applications to "talk" to each other globally. If I set up a similar platform in West Africa then there should be a way for Twitter users in the US to also accept my updates. Closed gardens in this case create single points of failure. (I'm interested in the less restrictive Identi.ca platform.)

This global contraction by Twitter creates opportunities for others. Jaiku, recently purchased by Google, now has the ability to grow deeper into other regional markets. And, if nothing else, Twitter has done us all a favor by launching a global pilot project that proves out the usefulness of this type of service. Launching country- or region-specific clones of this same type of service is now a real option. [Links included in original post.]

Related Stories:

• Open Question: Do You Use Twitter?
• Q&A with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit