I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it. This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs. There is nothing meaningful in this short essay.
Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.
i hate to be blandly negative on your comment, but jesus christ. pg made this call in april 2009, and twitter turned out to be a $40b company that may have potentially swung multiple elections. and you are here in 2025 taking the face value argument that "Message boards had this property, as did blogs.", and ignoring the fact that when you post things on twitter both important people AND the unwashed masses actually read it, and they are all hooked on a unique form factor only twitter owns. threads and mastodon and truth social can tout bullshit MAUs all they like but only twitter is twitter.
sure, pg didnt communicate with the hindsight specificity i just did, but he was directionally correct for the approximately correct reason (without explicitly saying that "any new protocol must have critical adoption to be meaningful" but that is implied in pgland).
comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting on the right horse for the wrong reasons
Twitter’s api was comprehensive and open back then. So was Facebook’s. You had a world where there was a centralized social graph and a centralized communication hub that everyone could build off of.
then you are being too strict about your analogies on what a protocol is, and your technologist hat (being precise > being directionally accurate) is getting in the way of being a better business person (job to be done is king).
Predicting that something will be a big deal and grow fast isn't what's at issue here. And yes, even in 2009 you could have made that prediction about Twitter.
The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition.
And we can now see that the end result is largely negative. It's not a public protocol, all of its content is behind a login wall. It didn't even join the fediverse.
Essentially, pg is imaginging something more like Bluesky or Mastodon and the fediverse, but for Twitter, which never came close to materializing.
I think Twitter will inevitably go down in history as being much more like an extended runtime edition of MySpace: yet another social network that became popular, made its founders who sold the company rich, but ultimately became a dying/dead entity under the next batch of management.
> The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition.
Every word has a literal definition, but every word also has an infinite variety of meaning, with nuance and subtlety that depends on context. It is quite obvious that Paul Graham didn't mean that Twitter was literally "another HTTP". I take the meaning to be something like "Twitter is an open platform that is widely-used enough to enable communication between other services" — not the case now, of course, but it certainly was at the time.
If he had written "Twitter is important because a critical mass of important people use it to communicate directly with the general public" I would not have called the essay dumb. What he actually wrote is that Twitter was a new messaging protocol which was (a) obviously not true at the time and (b) a red herring.
I'm not quite sure why he expressed himself in a way that is easily misunderstood. He probably shouldn't have used "protocol" as the word/concept he wanted to communicate.
I think what he was trying to say, is that it was a new/fresh modality of communication - a new way to communicate, by having public channels you could stream to.
The same way giving people access to email opens up new behaviour,
or access to networked computers allows new behaviour.
Or similar to how Job's iPhone drove people to a new behaviour.
Also, until they locked down their APIs in the name of control and monetization,
it had a feel of access to a new protocol.*
I am fully aware twitter is not an RPC specced protocol.
> I'm not quite sure why he expressed himself in a way that is easily misunderstood.
You both agree that expression is wrong. Why do you have to further recreate argument of the blog? These discussion based on loose associations are pointless and everyone will talk past each other.
Yes, a venture capitalist in the software space in san francisco made a call about such a company while it was in a bull run.
On the other hand, the post is 100% wrong, it's not a protocol and to the extent it is, it was not innovative (How is it fundamentally different than facebook?)
I know this was written 15 years ago, but that's what's interesting about it, it's a remnant from a previous era and it shows what the hype was.
Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.