Key facts:
Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter is funding a team of specialists to create a standard.There have been new technologies that make it viable for a decentralized approach, says Dorsey.Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, announced on Wednesday 11 that his firm is funding a group of specialists to create an open standard and decentralized social network. The group is composed by software architects, engineers and designers. “The main goal of Twitter is to be, in short, a client of this standard,” said Dorsey in a thread in which he gives details of his proposal.Twitter was so open in the beginning, says Dorsey, many saw the potential to become a standard of the Internet decentralized. “For many reasons, all reasonable at that time, we took a different path, which was made of Twitter, a service increasingly centralized. But there have been many changes in these years…”, says the CEO of Twitter.Among those changes, Dorsey refers first to the new challenges that centralization is not able to face with success. He gives as an example that the centralized policy to curb misleading information, or abuse are not able to grow in the long term because that would represent a very large charge for those who assume these tasks.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. ?— jack ??? (@jack) December 11, 2019
On the other hand, there is a change of paradigm in the social networks, the mere storage of content to the search of mechanisms tailored to attract the attention of the users.
The value of social media is moving away from the hosting of content, to algorithms of recommendation for selective attention. Unfortunately, those algorithms are typically owners and it is not possible to choose or create alternatives. For now.Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter.
Another of the challenges of centralization is, according to Dorsey, the incentives that are currently in social networks, focusing on content and conversations that lead to disputes, instead of fostering discussions on information content.All of these challenges of centralization growing out of the social networks could be faced with a transition to a decentralised model, since there are emerging technologies that allow, points out the executive.
Finally, there are new technologies emerging that make it more viable for a decentralized approach. The blockchain points to a series of solutions decentralized to a content storage, a governance and even a monetization more open and durable. There is much work to be done, but the basic elements are there.Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter.
Among the benefits of the initiative announced, Dorsey emphasizes that this will allow the company to access and contribute to a much larger volume of conversations public and more focus on the efforts of the social network to create algorithms of recommendation open to promote conversations “healthy”.There are, however, many challenges ahead.
There are MANY challenges for this to work, and that Twitter may feel motivated to be a customer of this open standard. It is for this reason that the work should be done in a transparent manner, to the view of all; it does not belong to any private corporation, promoting further the principles of decentralized and open Internet. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter.
The announcement of Dorsey has had a great impact, which is reflected in more than 5,000 retweets and more than 13,000 likes at the time of the writing of this article. Also, in the comments made in the thread of the tweet from Dorsey, we note a good response to the initiative of Twitter in favor of an open standard and decentralized social networking.Jake Chervinsky thanks to Dorsey for his initiative to take to Twitter and Circle toward “models that show how companies can use the decentralization of effective and responsible leadership”.Some comments suggest that there is already a good base of work around standards for social networks decentralised. Simon Phipps, with a long career in organizations that support open software, ask Dorsey if the initiative announced will build on the work already done and implemented in open source code, which has resulted in open standards for social media decentralized.Jack Dorsey has been linked with the technologies associated to the blockchain and to the cryptocurrencies, since in addition to direct Twitter, is the CEO of the payments platform Square. In march of this year, invited developers to the ecosystem of Bitcoin, to work full-time, in exchange for a salary in the startup Square.Has championed the open standards on bitcoin and has stated that this criptomoneda is becoming the “national currency” of the Internet. Even, Dorsey has experimented with a node’s own Lightning Network, the network of micro-payments of Bitcoin.