Saturday, July 5, 2008

All the news that's fit to tweet.

Twitter breaks news of DC-area earthquake

Reports of yesterday’s small-scale earthquake near Washington, DC, first appeared on Twitter, Reuters reports. “At about 1:37 pm, software developer Dave Winer asked the Twitterverse: ‘Explosion in Falls Church, VA?’ … A flurry of posts, or ‘tweets,’ followed, as users reported rumbles as far away as Alexandria.” Local media reported the rumbling as possible blasting at nearby Ft. Belvoir 60 minutes after Winer’s initial Tweet, and confirmed it as a 1.8 magnitude earthquake 30 minutes after that. Read the story.

Bonus: John Borthwick captured the conversation in a screenshot of Summize.

May 7, 2008 | Filed Under Uses | Leave a Comment 

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 | 1 Comment 

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