A decentralized Twitter?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.  

Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere." 

Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages. 

And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?  

The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina. 

Larry Dignan: "Twitter is a classic case of a neat little tool that wasn't built to scale but now has to because it has become a big deal."