No need to fix Twitter
The microblogging service Twitter is felt to be 2/3 of the day “over capacity”, means: not working. Some of it’s features have fully or partly been disabled due to it’s server overload. But: that’s no surprise at all.
Don’t mind about Twitter. It is a perfect proof of concept whether microblogging works or not. Mind about something else: Twitter is a centralized platform. This is cruel in times of decentralization.
Twitter does not have to be fixed. Twitter has to be replaced. Microblogging needs it’s natural implementation as a decentralized communication network.
What does Twitter in fact do? It takes your posting, delivers it to your friends and your public timeline. It offers you direct messaging and RSS. And it also offers you friend networking functions.
A good open source networking-twitter clone would be very helpful these days. Think of it as a web of trust. All it needs is some protocol, maybe based on XMLRPC-Ping and/or XMPP-techniques. I’m not a serious program designer. You are going to add your friends by pinging em (something like XMPP publishing), inform them with a pingback that you reacted to their postings/talk to them.
Sounds like a good project for a plugin for Wordpress, Textpattern, Drupal and all the others. Or am I mistaken? I think it would be a very good point to start from, promoting several nice techniques such as OpenID by making use of it.
