The Eric Raymond’s essay on The Cathedral and the Bazaar compares cathedral and bazaar to software. Raymond referred to the cathedral as proprietary model that has corporate interest and is user based. As for the bazaar he referred to software that is free and open source and institutionalized. So, I realized that it can also refer to Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter is like the cathedral because it has one purpose, which is to tweet. You are limited to just 140 characters and everything is very institutionalized. You can’t express much on Twitter besides tweeting what you had for breakfast. It is elaborate and a user based site. Everyone works together on Twitter by retweeting or commenting on other people’s tweets giving feedback.
Facebook it is more free and you can post statuses as long as you wish and post photos, videos, and can write on friends walls. It is much more open and profits from supporters which Facebook has over 20 million users. It’s pretty easy to navigate and manage rather than Twitter is more complex. There is less control on Facebook because users have the freedom to express themselves and make their profiles their own. You could say it is individualized because users have the power to make their own groups or post videos of things they believe in.
The cathedral vs. bazaar is a social metaphor so it is similar to the social network. In which makes Twitter vs. Facebook a great metaphor.
Interesting application of the cathedral / bazaar metaphor, Jennifer. Given that Raymond uses the metaphor to refer to the business model of proprietary vs. open source software development, how would you account for the business models of Facebook and Twitter?
ReplyDeleteNow that you mention that limit on Twitter, I can't seem to fit what I want to say on my Tweets anymore. Twitter has to find a way to beat out Facebook, because Facebook is killing people's time, where they can use it elsewhere.
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