Twitter’s Stunted Growth: An Inference from Muybridge’s Photos
Eadweard Muybridge presaged a kind of moving picture with his use of multiple cameras to capture motion. The zoopraxiscope, also invented by Muybridge, brought the images to life in a primitive way. You can think of the web version of Twitter as a bit like a series of Muybridge’s still photos on a page.
The zooproxiscope is comparable to Twitter’s polling method of simulating a live flow of real-time movement. It’s movement done with mirrors.
Twitter (as in Kleenex) with a real-time XMPP flow is a genuine moving picture. It’s hardly surprising that looking at a series of still pictures, the users of Twitter deduce real-time flow of messages and a method of tracking one-to-one and one-to-many conversations.
By choking off independent developer access to the XMPP flavor of Twitter and attempting to place monetization at this point in the network, Twitter faces a turning point. The service grew like a weed when it embraced the rhizomatic ethic. Now Twitter hesitates, and seems to turn to a classic arborescent play. They turn from the economics of abundance to the economics of scarcity– and scarcity must be created and enforced by contract. By stunting their own growth, Twitter gives Plan B the opportunity to grow like wildfire.