Why decentralizing Twitter is so important

Sunday, May 04, 2008 by Dave Winer.

At dinner last night, Scott Rosenberg, researching his history of blogging book, said he couldn't find any trace of the original version of Tim Berners-Lee's original site, info.cern.ch. I found this amazing. 

When I was maintaining the What Are Weblogs page on weblogs.com, in 2000, I said up-front that TBL's site was also the first weblog. The crazy thing is I remember looking at the site, with my own eyes, and realizing that I was looking at history, like listening to the first telephone conversation or watching Thomas Edison turn on his first electric light bulb.  

Today, in 2008, the network we're building with Twitter is imho as historic as any of these things, we're all creating artifacts and connections that are even more fragile than the early web, because, unlike the web, it's 100 percent centralized. We all trust the owners of Twitter, but they're human, even with the best intent, we all are taking a risk that the network could disappear at any time. And unlike the Internet which has huge amounts of redundancy built-in, if there's any redundancy in Twitter, none of us outside the company know about it. 

This is just plain unacceptable.  

I'm on the case because I care so much about this medium, and if it were to disappear, I would feel partially responsible if I hadn't raised a huge red flag warning about this very unreliable architecture we're building on. 

And, if you know where there's a backup of the original info.cern.ch, please post a link here, in a comment. 

Update #1: A new web service for Twitter clients. 

Update #2: Marc Canter checks in.