Inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee has questioned whether Twitter is ‘part of the future’ of social networks
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, has claimed that the popular social network Twitter is used mostly by people expressing extreme opinions, and that it’s “not a place for reasoned discussion”.
The web scientist claimed that in future all social networks will be able to talk to each other, rather thanbeing lmitied to one platform.
Speaking at The Royal Society’s ‘New Web’ conference in London, Sir Tim said he noticed the phenomenon when discussing the issue of net neutrality, the idea that all traffic online, from video to email, should be assigned the same priority.
“All the tweets were extreme,” said Sir Tim. He asked “is Twitter going to be a part of [the future of the web]? We need something a bit more sophisticated.“
Twitter limits individual tweets to 140 characters, and Sir Tim suggested that “Twitter isn’t designed for the middle ground. It’s not a place where you have reasoned discussion”
Sir Tim’s current role is at the W3C consortium, working on common standards for use across the web. He said that social networks should allow easy communication across their various “walled gardens”, and also urged software developers to build applications for the web as a whole using standards that mobile phones can also use, rather than build applications specifically for individual platforms such as Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS.
If people used the web effectively and without proprietary systems, Sir Tim even claimed that “nifty new blends of democracy” might evolve that would be more attractive to countries that are not currently democratic.
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