comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting on the right horse for the wrong reasons
Twitter’s api was comprehensive and open back then. So was Facebook’s. You had a world where there was a centralized social graph and a centralized communication hub that everyone could build off of.
then you are being too strict about your analogies on what a protocol is, and your technologist hat (being precise > being directionally accurate) is getting in the way of being a better business person (job to be done is king).
Predicting that something will be a big deal and grow fast isn't what's at issue here. And yes, even in 2009 you could have made that prediction about Twitter.
The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition.
And we can now see that the end result is largely negative. It's not a public protocol, all of its content is behind a login wall. It didn't even join the fediverse.
Essentially, pg is imaginging something more like Bluesky or Mastodon and the fediverse, but for Twitter, which never came close to materializing.
I think Twitter will inevitably go down in history as being much more like an extended runtime edition of MySpace: yet another social network that became popular, made its founders who sold the company rich, but ultimately became a dying/dead entity under the next batch of management.
> The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition.
Every word has a literal definition, but every word also has an infinite variety of meaning, with nuance and subtlety that depends on context. It is quite obvious that Paul Graham didn't mean that Twitter was literally "another HTTP". I take the meaning to be something like "Twitter is an open platform that is widely-used enough to enable communication between other services" — not the case now, of course, but it certainly was at the time.
