I’m still intrigued by a fictitious service that would allow universal text distribution to occur, so whatever protocol you are currently using (web, email, SMS, instant-message, etc), you could send and receive within the confines of (and with respect to) that protocol’s software interface.

So the protocol and software would fade to the background and allow transparent communication to occur. The infrastructure would handle the conversion from one medium to another.

Twitter kind of established this, and in 2007 I thought that was their focus (mashing different distribution systems into a single entity), but I’m not so sure anymore. They’ve gotten so popular I think less of them as a tech tool and now more so a marketing tool.

What intrigued me initially about Twitter’s ability to send and receive updates via web, SMS, instant-message, was that it blurred the lines of protocols so that we no longer had to be concerned about which software system we were using. As long as you could push a message onto the internet, it would be routed correctly. It made communication a lot easier.

I don’t know if we’re there yet today. Perhaps there is some app that attempts to achieve this and hasn’t made headlines to me yet.

And then I wonder if we even need to be there.

I definitely feel the web can be too technical, and controlled too much by mega-corporations who think they know what’s best for us – with how we want to communicate and express ourselves online.

All we really want to do is connect with one another, right?

So what difference does it make if we use SMS, email, Facebook, instant-message? Text is text.