Twitter is funding five developers to build decentralized standards for social media
Twitter is funding a developer team, dubbed Blue Sky, to establish a decentralized standard for social media, said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on the social media platform he helms.
In a Twitter thread on Wednesday, Dorsey said the team will include up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers, and Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal will lead the effort to find the team lead.
Dorsey outlined why he thinks an open-source standard is critical to social media. As he recalled, when Twitter was first founded, it was "so open" that many people thought it would be a decentralized internet standard. However, "for a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path," said Dorsey.
Dorsey thinks now is the time to revive to that initial vision. He planed for Blue Sky to either find an existing standard to build upon or develop a new standard from scratch. The goal for Twitter is to eventually become a client of this standard, according to Dorsey. Meanwhile, the social media giant will also focus on building open recommendation algorithms that can "promote healthy conversation," he said.
Besides leading Twitter, Dorsey is also the founder and CEO of Square, a payments firm that bets big on cryptocurrencies. The firm's Cash App, a payments app favored by millennials, allows users to buy bitcoin. In Q3, the firm hit a record $148 million in bitcoin sales, a 245% jump compared to Q3 2018.
Meanwhile, a second Square subsidiary, Square Crypto, has assembled a team of engineers and designers to develop the bitcoin network. Drawing a parallel between Square Crypto and Blue Sky, Dorsey said what Square does to bitcoin is what Twitter will do to social media.
