Saturday, July 5, 2008

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Winer: Twitter must be decentralized

Dave Winer. Photo by bmann on flickr.Over the weekend, RSS guru Dave Winer (@davewiner) has begun a project to create a decentralized backup to Twitter. Every time Twitter goes down (an all-too-frequent occurrence) it leaves us all stranded, with no easy way to get back in touch. Winer has proposed that users not only send their tweets to Twitter, but also publish them to an alternate RSS feed. If Twitter ever went down, you could pull tweets from the RSS feeds of those you follow–rather than from the Twitter service–and your followers could pull from your alternate RSS feed, which you would continue to update.

But once you’ve gone this far, why stop there? Why should microblogging be centralized at Twitter? If a microblogging standard could be developed, you’d never have scaling problems and third parties could supply the rest of the Twitter service, including SMS features and interesting presentations. More importantly, Winer argues, you wouldn’t have the wonderful network that’s been built resting on a single failure point. Read the story.

What do you think? Does a push to a decentralized standard make sense?

May 5, 2008 | Filed Under Technology 

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Comments

One response to this article, post yours below

  1. Jerry Brito on May 5th, 2008

    Update: TechCrunch writes today in technical detail about how Twiter could be decentralized using some existing standards. It makes the great point that “Generally services like Twitter, once they reach a critical mass of users, can’t really be stopped because the network effect kicks in as a massive barrier to entry.”

    I’m not so sure we’re not past that critical mass. I wonder how many folks would give up using Twitter and switch to an alternate microblogging standard in the name of opennes. Additionally, people like going to one site and getting all the functionality—especially if all their friends are already there. It’s easier to be convinced by, “You should really start to twitter,” than by, “You should really get a microblog.” What do you think? Is Twitter stopable? Should it be stopped?

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