In this blog entry about Twitter and Jaiku, the author makes a very good point:
So, I’ve got an idea. Rather than hopping from third-party service to third-party service, let’s look at the facts:
1. Twitter, Jaiku etc are just short, single-user comment walls with an RSS feed.
2. RSS aggregators are everywhere.
3. Distributed services are more resilient than monolithic, centralised ones.
So why not create hundreds of installable Twitter-like services, optionally with SMS gateways, certainly with a simple XML-RPC interface that lets you write to them with a standard set of clients, and link them together with RSS?
That way you get everything you get from Twitter, in a distributed model that doesn’t have a single point of failure. It’s simple and ultimately would be easier for everyone than flitting from service to service to service.
He makes the point for the triumph of the subjective by arguing for the peer-to-peer version of twitter, which can also be used as the source structure of the ultimate multi-user peer-to-peer synchronous platform. I previously told someone that Twitter is like playing a trumpet in a crowded room full of trumpets. Server based twitter services are like having a conductor of the trumpets with strict control - if Twitter fails, nobody can play, and everything played on Twitter is by the approval of the conductor. I want a freeform jazz trumpet section, with a remote control that controls everyone's speaker volume - Trumpet (sm)?
Back in my Usenet days, I subscribed to about 40 different groups. For some of those groups I received a daily digest, others I read in strict chronological order, and others I read via thread. Wouldn't it be nice to enable a Trumpet interface that sorts and groups them into meaningful (to me) patterns, or allows me to view one persons Twitters as a daily digest, or high alerts, or review a resultant conversation from responded @twitters?
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