Decentralized Twitter’s time has come
This is exactly why I resisted to signing up to Twitter in the first place and why I’ve continued to complain about relying upon a centralized service at all. [1], [2], [3], [4]
That’s why God (or whomever) invented DNS. If we are to rely upon Twitter as infrastructure - it better sure as hell be decentralized!
Now how do you do that - and let other vendors in on it?
I’m sure that’s the last thing Evan Williams and Fred Wilson wanna see happen - but their lack of understanding the nuances and issues here - kind of are forcing the point.
Look - it’s not that Twitter is totally coolio. But we need 100 Twitters. That’s what I said before and why I’ll keep saying it.
“Start to realize?”
Ahem.
I’ve always felt that it was dangerous to build on a centralized service, and I started talking publicly about a decentralized Twitter before you started using it.
But first, before decentralizing something, you have to understand it.
And get this — I don’t claim to understand it, and I’ve put as much time and thought into it as anyone else has.
But after last week’s four-day outage, it came back home that I had been too lazy and it was time to get serious about building a backup that could survive not just an outage but Twitter’s disappearance.
So let’s drop the arrogance Marc, and let’s put our heads together and figure out what we all need to do. I’m sure Ev and Fred understand things about Twitter that you and I have no clue about. Respec man, that’s what it’s all about!
Love ya.
“Start to realize?”
Ahem.
I’ve always felt that it was dangerous to build on a centralized service, and I started talking publicly about a decentralized Twitter before you started using it.
But first, before decentralizing something, you have to understand it.
And get this — I don’t claim to understand it, and I’ve put as much time and thought into it as anyone else has.
But after last week’s four-day outage, it came back home that I had been too lazy and it was time to get serious about building a backup that could survive not just an outage but Twitter’s disappearance.
So let’s drop the arrogance Marc, and let’s put our heads together and figure out what we all need to do. I’m sure Ev and Fred understand things about Twitter that you and I have no clue about. Respec man, that’s what it’s all about!
Love ya.
“Start to realize?”
Ahem.
I’ve always felt that it was dangerous to build on a centralized service, and I started talking publicly about a decentralized Twitter before you started using it.
But first, before decentralizing something, you have to understand it.
And get this — I don’t claim to understand it, and I’ve put as much time and thought into it as anyone else has.
But after last week’s four-day outage, it came back home that I had been too lazy and it was time to get serious about building a backup that could survive not just an outage but Twitter’s disappearance.
So let’s drop the arrogance Marc, and let’s put our heads together and figure out what we all need to do. I’m sure Ev and Fred understand things about Twitter that you and I have no clue about. Respec man, that’s what it’s all about!
Love ya.
So, Dave… have you started working on something? Is there a project, somewhere, that people can get involved with, to start figuring out how this will work?
So, Dave… have you started working on something? Is there a project, somewhere, that people can get involved with, to start figuring out how this will work?
So, Dave… have you started working on something? Is there a project, somewhere, that people can get involved with, to start figuring out how this will work?
IMO, one Twitter was one too many.
IMO, one Twitter was one too many.
IMO, one Twitter was one too many.
Marc Arrington is surprisingly arrogant. Good M&A lawyer, columnist, owner of a miniture publishing empire but over his head when it comes to politech discussions.
Marc Arrington is surprisingly arrogant. Good M&A lawyer, columnist, owner of a miniture publishing empire but over his head when it comes to politech discussions.
Marc Arrington is surprisingly arrogant. Good M&A lawyer, columnist, owner of a miniture publishing empire but over his head when it comes to politech discussions.
Sexy idea, but the totally wrong way to go. I wrote all search protocols for the second-generation Gnutella network at LimeWire, and I learned the hard way never to forget Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distributed Computing: Don’t distribute your objects.
I agree with the dangers of single points and failure and centralized points of filtering and control. The answer is not blind decentralization, though. The answer is open protocols that allow you to easily replicate data to many servers under different authorities. I’d use Atom Publishing Protocol or simple REST APIs anyone can implement. I go into more detail here:
http://adamfisk.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/decentralized-twitter-a-bad-idea/
This whole meme honestly gives the Twitter team too much respect. Centralization is not the reason they can’t scale. I understand the need to get the problem out of their hands because they haven’t been able to solve it, but come on. You wanto create a massive distributed architecture because these guys can’t figure it out? How about open sourcing the server code and lending them a hand? Distributing the problem will only make it harder. Good ol’ KISS.
No disrespect to Evan Williams. That guy’s awesome, but maybe just a little outside his core competency. He and his team will fix it. Keep the faith.
Sexy idea, but the totally wrong way to go. I wrote all search protocols for the second-generation Gnutella network at LimeWire, and I learned the hard way never to forget Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distributed Computing: Don’t distribute your objects.
I agree with the dangers of single points and failure and centralized points of filtering and control. The answer is not blind decentralization, though. The answer is open protocols that allow you to easily replicate data to many servers under different authorities. I’d use Atom Publishing Protocol or simple REST APIs anyone can implement. I go into more detail here:
http://adamfisk.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/decentralized-twitter-a-bad-idea/
This whole meme honestly gives the Twitter team too much respect. Centralization is not the reason they can’t scale. I understand the need to get the problem out of their hands because they haven’t been able to solve it, but come on. You wanto create a massive distributed architecture because these guys can’t figure it out? How about open sourcing the server code and lending them a hand? Distributing the problem will only make it harder. Good ol’ KISS.
No disrespect to Evan Williams. That guy’s awesome, but maybe just a little outside his core competency. He and his team will fix it. Keep the faith.
Sexy idea, but the totally wrong way to go. I wrote all search protocols for the second-generation Gnutella network at LimeWire, and I learned the hard way never to forget Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distributed Computing: Don’t distribute your objects.
I agree with the dangers of single points and failure and centralized points of filtering and control. The answer is not blind decentralization, though. The answer is open protocols that allow you to easily replicate data to many servers under different authorities. I’d use Atom Publishing Protocol or simple REST APIs anyone can implement. I go into more detail here:
http://adamfisk.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/decentralized-twitter-a-bad-idea/
This whole meme honestly gives the Twitter team too much respect. Centralization is not the reason they can’t scale. I understand the need to get the problem out of their hands because they haven’t been able to solve it, but come on. You wanto create a massive distributed architecture because these guys can’t figure it out? How about open sourcing the server code and lending them a hand? Distributing the problem will only make it harder. Good ol’ KISS.
No disrespect to Evan Williams. That guy’s awesome, but maybe just a little outside his core competency. He and his team will fix it. Keep the faith.
Maybe I need to RTFA but…
Wouldn’t decentralized Twitter just be RSS driven email?
If you didn’t have a centralized authority limiting it, wouldn’t people want to raise the 140 character limit, ad pictures, attachments, multiple CCs and BCs, categories, tags etc. etc.?
And if you really want your own twitter for some localized or private purpose, it seems that it would be simple enough to do, I’m not much of a programmer, but I could write a version of Twitter for my Lan in a weekend.
Twitter isn’t about the technology. Twitter’s magic is that they have aggregated peoples attention. That’s my thought anyway.
Maybe I need to RTFA but…
Wouldn’t decentralized Twitter just be RSS driven email?
If you didn’t have a centralized authority limiting it, wouldn’t people want to raise the 140 character limit, ad pictures, attachments, multiple CCs and BCs, categories, tags etc. etc.?
And if you really want your own twitter for some localized or private purpose, it seems that it would be simple enough to do, I’m not much of a programmer, but I could write a version of Twitter for my Lan in a weekend.
Twitter isn’t about the technology. Twitter’s magic is that they have aggregated peoples attention. That’s my thought anyway.
Maybe I need to RTFA but…
Wouldn’t decentralized Twitter just be RSS driven email?
If you didn’t have a centralized authority limiting it, wouldn’t people want to raise the 140 character limit, ad pictures, attachments, multiple CCs and BCs, categories, tags etc. etc.?
And if you really want your own twitter for some localized or private purpose, it seems that it would be simple enough to do, I’m not much of a programmer, but I could write a version of Twitter for my Lan in a weekend.
Twitter isn’t about the technology. Twitter’s magic is that they have aggregated peoples attention. That’s my thought anyway.