Vyrotek

I can’t believe it but someone actually implemented the idea I had some time ago. Sadly my friends didn’t seem to think it was a good idea when I tried to pitch them idea for a project we should work on.

So what is LinkBee all about? Basically it’s a TinyURL type service but they insert an ad on the site that you’re linking to and YOU make money off it! That’s right, they share 50% of the revenue with you. Its easy to create and manage a collection of links using their site and they also tell you how much money you have made so far. There is even the ability to refer friends and earn revenue from the links they share!

It’s easy to Sign Up for LinkBee, it literally takes 5 seconds. If you have a decent twitter following this is definitely something to check out.

http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/i-have-this-graph-up-on-my-screen-all.html

So now twitter wants to be all transparent with their problems… I dont think they really had much choice though. It seems they have been having problems all week long. But only now do they share that they really have no idea whats going on.

Honestly, a 4th quarter Neumont student could recreate a better performing twitter… you guys should make one.

And just to clarify, I might seem a bit odd that I dislike twitter so much yet I blog about it so much. I explained my reasoning to a friend a few nights ago… First, whenever twitter breaks its all over the blogs I read, ugh. Second, Twitter is so broke and such a simple service that I cant help wanting to slap someone and fix it myself.

Twitter, I’m available! Dont yell at me when I replace ALL your code with Asp.net MVC and SqlServer2k5 and I do it in a weekend.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about creating a distributed twitter network because of how often Twitter seems to go down. Some people say it will solve the problem because it eliminates the single point of failure. But, who is going to want to host such a thing for free?! If you start distributing your data then you start depending on those endpoints on being online. So what’s the solution? Think about this…

Isnt twitter just restricted email? 

Twitter is just a blob of text you send (spam) to people. The ONLY reason its 140 characters is because thats what most SMS systems allow you to send and receive per message. When you write a new ‘tweet’ it becomes available to all your friends instantly. Then one day it hit me, isnt twitter just restricted email?! Writing a tweet is no different than me spamming my friends with an email. The more I thought about a distributed twitter the more I realized that people basically wanted SMTP for twitter messages. But why reinvent it for twitter? Why not use it!? It solves more problems than you might think.

SMTP saves the day?

Everyone knows how to setup an email account and the majority of email services offer a way to access your email (POP3) using third party software. Say I were to create an email account: twitter@vyrotek.com and I registered it at some new twitter kind of site called… AnotherTwitter (sure why not). I give this new site the username/password so that it can access the emails in this account.

Now, whenever I feel like the world really wants to know what I’m doing I basically send an email to myself! I write an email to twitter@vyrotek.com and now there’s an email sitting in there. Now this is where the new site does its magic. You have basically a public inbox! Going to AnotherTwitter.com/Vyrotek would access the emails in this inbox and display them just like twitter does. Of course the whole friend following thing could be slapped on top of this easily and when someone views my timeline the system would just request all the ‘tweet’ emails from everyone’s inbox of those people that I am currently following.

Benefits

• No central database storing all the tweets.
  • Any email service becomes your own database of tweets - Gmail, Hotmail, etc
• No single point of failure – If one email service goes down, it wont affect anyone else.
• Tweets can now have file attachments.
• People can use any email application to send new tweets.
  • Most mobile phones already support email

Possible Gotcha’s

One issue is that the email account you setup for these twitter messages might need to be kept a secret. This is because if someone discovered the email they could ‘spam’ it and now they posting tweets as if they were you. This could be addressed in a couple of ways - From Address filtering or requiring a password/key on every post are just two I thought of.

Interesing Side-Effects and Ideas

- The ability for multiple people to use the same account could be considered a feature! A group of friends could all contribute to the same account.

- Or, if someone named Bob were to email twitter@vyrotek.com then maybe the system would detect those as ‘private tweets’ directed to just Vyrotek. If this were the case then you could share this email account with others and even if they didnt know what twitter was they are technically using it! (from Vyrotek’s perspective).

- What if people wanted to use their existing email accounts but not have everything broadcasted as a tweet? They could as long as there was some sort of ‘keyword’ in the subject line that AnotherTwitter could detect. This would be configured in the site to be whatever the user chooses.

- Groups could also be formed based on what email domain you are using. For example, you could easily find all students from Neumont if students used their @student.neumont.edu email accounts.

I know I went a bit random on the ideas but I just typed them as they popped into my head. I want to know what you guys think. I’m really tempted to play around with this idea and make some sort of prototype.

 CNet News has reported that Twitter has recently signed for $15-$20 Million in VC funding…

“A source familiar with the negotiations tells me that Twitter signed a term sheet for “either $15 million or $20 million” last week. We’re still trying to find out who is in, but the word is that it’s largely an inside round of funding with one outsider setting the price.”

I am amazed at how companies with no business model in sight can get so much attention and so much funding while other companies that offer a real service are finding it difficult to get funded. Obviously some people think that just having a lot of people using your services makes it valuable. My guess is that Twitter will end up like YouTube. Some company will end up buying them and that company will have to take a hit and pay for whatever it costs to keep it online until they figure out some business model.

I hope you twitter fans like webpages 80% covered in Ads as well as Ads in your twitter feeds.

In other news, I have yet to figure out why people use Twitter.