1/ Hypothesis: there are technologies so basic that they serve as prequels to economic organization and utility vs. private type debates
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2/ Possible examples: Craigslist, Twitter, Unix shell. One maybe: Wikipedia. They are all sui generis and defy analysis within categories
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3/ They are destined neither for commodity status as private sector technologies, nor for utility status as public services.
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4/ What they do instead is *create* frontier land, sparking land-grab economic races.
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5/ Twitter "running a clown car into a gold mine" is closer to Columbus (yeah yeah) discovering America than a company executing on an idea
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6/ Unix shell is a more subtle example, but I mean it in the sense of "every shell command becomes a unicorn business" (who said that? PG?)
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7/ One reason these entities "fail" as both business and utility entities is that they discover territories too vast for one entity to own
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8/ Pattern already clear with Craigslist: it doesn't get "disrupted". Instead companies like AirBnB bite off chunks small enough for 1 corp
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9/ Twitter "failing" to own the revolutions it obviously caused (messaging, bots) isn't a failure really if viewed that way.
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it seems weird to me to credit Twitter for messaging and bots. I mean those have been central to tech culture since the 80s
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. Not in the modern form. I see more Twitter DNA in Slack than I see IRC DNA. But yeah, some justice to that.
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. I'm not interested in genealogy of ideas as much as scaling and spreading of a pattern into mainstream
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I think it's a merger of both. Slack's channels are IRC-style N-to-N, not Twitter-style who-you-follow, & there's no Twitter/Planet TL
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