Bird calls.

Two years ago, at SXSW Interactive, I signed up for Twitter, a nascent “microblogging” service. It’s funny looking back — it caught on a little during panels as an ad hoc backchannel, but most people were using it after hours as an alternative to Dodgeball, checking on where people were and which parties were worth going to. Most of people I talked to predicted we’d all abandon it after the conference. And yet for some reason we stuck with it.

In 2008, Twitter wasn’t the buzz, but it was still there. By then it was engrained in the tech-geek culture and became the pulse of the conference, combining backchannel, “live-tweeting,” friend-finding and general chatter, much to the annoyance of any users who weren’t there but following those who were. The Fail Whale made plenty of appearances as the servers strained under the weight of the SXSW traffic. Twitter was old news, and “who will be this year’s Twitter?” was the question being asked. Video and Facebook apps were the hot topics. Twitter was a tool.

In retrospect, Steven Levy’s declaration of SXSWi ’07 as Twitter’s tipping point was a bit premature. It may have caught on with the techies, but Twitter still had only half a million users a year later. From there it took off for a 1,382 percent rise to more than 7 million in February 2009.

This year * at SXSW Interactive, we weren’t talking about what the next Twitter would be. We were talking about Twitter again. In the intervening year, it had become a game changer. It was central to every discussion of marketing, social media and communications at the conference. (I walked out of a panel about the future of PR because the panelists kept harping that “you gotta be on Twitter.” Duh, the people here have been on it for two years.) Journalists discussed how it could be harnessed to grow and hold onto an audience. A lot of buzz surrounded new Twitter apps and services built on its service.

Twitter, this thing that didn’t exist three years ago and seemed like a limited-use novelty two years ago is now an important — some might even say vital — part of a lot of people’s lives. But it’s not an open system. It’s a lot like AIM was back when it was AOL Instant Messenger: a wonderful, extremely useful service that is non-portable and doesn’t talk to other similar services. (Well, Twitter does a little, thanks to its API, but no in the way that, say, one email system talks to another.) Sure, there are competitors, but you can’t communicate with them — tweets can’t be seen nor sent to Jaiku, and vice-versa. Perhaps just as AIM, Microsoft Messenger, Gtalk and other IM platforms learned to talk to each other, there should be an open, shared platform from which you could follow everyone’s microblogging wherever it may be.

That’s the idea behind Birdfeeder (or brdfdr in Web2.0-y disemvowelization) and its accompanying microblogging protocol, FETHR (Featherweight Entangled Timelines over HTTP Requests). The idea of a decentralized Twitter is an intriguing one, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether it takes off. Much like email, as Twitter the concept becomes a utility, the need to break the monopoly grows. I suppose the real question will be whether Twitter itself will go along with it.

As an aside, I’m getting a little tired of the bird metaphor for microblogging/micropublishing/microwhateveritiswe’redoing. It’s cute, and “twittering” is a great term for what essentially amounts to textual background chatter, but the metaphor as a whole doesn’t leave us with much to work with. With so many of the good birdhouse/nesting/assorted other bird-related names already taken, we’ll soon have to resort to bird species for ideas, and a lot of those are already in use. Although come to think of it, there’s a great opportunity for someone to create an app for people who want to get away from all the tweets. They can call it “Ostrich.”

* Yes, this is the start of my long overdue post-SXSW wrap-up. More soon. ⇑