After Twitter

The more I think about it, the more ready I become for the end of Twitter. If it went away, I, personally, would not be so terribly inconvenienced. I would lose a few things, but I’d gain others, too. I’d gain back time. I would put greater emphasis on articles and books in my life. I might even write more. There are conceivable benefits of a world without Twitter.

But what about what we lose. We lose a very important online town square. We lose a chunk of free political discourse. We lose trustworthy, second-by-second real-time breaking news. We lose diversity in voices.

Can these lost things be found again in blogs? Are there other platforms for less privileged voices to ring out? I suspect the answer will be “no” on both accounts for a long while.

What I want to build is something which exists in that world between RSS readers, personal blogs, and Twitter.