A LOT of hype was going around this past week as two twitter accounts raced towards the million follower mark, CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk, which was not owned by cnn until this week) and Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk). The debate was raging on as to whether or not this was a legitimate thing to be shooting for. But legitimate or not, people are missing out on the fundamental issues here (@aplusk kept reiterating it), that this is not about merely a popularity contest, this is about an individual being able to use the same tools for distribution as traditional media companies, and reach as many or more users without the need for traditional media players.

The democratization of media distribution is a key tenet of what we’ve been discussing for years when it comes to social media, and it seems like we now have our poster child for the movement. That poster child is Ashton Kutcher. Though to be honest I would rather have seen someone unknown from mainstream media become the first twitter millionaire, but thats far harder than getting a celeb like Ashton to the top.

So what does this really mean? Simple, it means that any individual with enough interesting content and charisma can theoretically get the reach that a traditional media conglomerate was wielding in the past.

or why I haven’t continued building on the twitter platform

As many of you may know, my team at Infinimedia built one of the most popular twitter clients out there, Twitbin, which has over 35,000 users now. We were one of the first to build something along these lines (definitely not the first by any stretch), but we were clearly not the last or most popular.  Something interesting occured shortly after we built it: we stopped building.

You might be thinking, why is this even remotely interesting Brian? Well typically when we build something, we keep adding to it and improving it. With Twitbin, we have added a few things here and there, updated it to the latest versions of Firefox, etc., but we haven’t overhauled it or added anything major in a year. So we’ve been sitting on plans for a major overhaul + expanded offerings for something like 9 months, but we haven’t moved on it. Why? Well we couldn’t afford the time to something suffering from such instability. No matter how kickass we could make Twitbin 2.0, we would still be inundated with emails every time twitter goes down. If you’re building on someone else’s platform, whenever they are down, you are down. There is no way around that.

So will we ever start working on Twitbin2.0? Well thats a good question. We have a few options, but building something that makes money off of a service that doesn’t is inherently tough. We experimented with ads in our client, I think we made so little it wasn’t worth the annoyance it caused our users. But the underlying issue is reliability. We would love to invest the time and money in building out more creative and useful twitter tools, but at the moment there are other platforms which are more reliable and more money behind making them good long term bets.

I am not proclaiming twitter as a platform dead by any means. It will take ages for a plurk or a pownce to overtake twitter as far as utility (utility to me is the # of users on it x attention spent there). I am just thinking that its time to look back at the platform and all the platforms out there and measure their worth.  So I want to know what you think about twitter’s platform or any of the other micro-messaging platforms?

• looking for a dasboot for beerfest tomorrow. any suggestions? #

• anyone fly on virgin america yet? #
• refreshmiami tonight folks, 730pm books and books in coral gables #