Monday, May 19, 2008

Dezentralized Twitter

A couple of recent Gillmor Gang episodes were dedicated to the concept (and necessity) of a decentralized twitter, and/or opening up twitter...

At one point, Marc Canter says:
"But there could be technically 100 Twitters, each controlled by different vendors, and we could have a backend kind of DNS thing to federate users. So if I registered with Pownce or Jaiku, my handle would work on Twitter, or vice-versa. And that’s what I’ve been saying."
More of Marc's reasoning on his blog here.
I don't think this can ever happen - as a DNS like infrastructure.

DNS might be a nice model of decentralization (in probably most ways), but to me it is a very one-way model of propagating data ...
You don't have to push data through DNS... it get's pulled by a host lookup... that's why I say "propagate".

But you have to push tweets. You cannot have every possible Twitter-Clone instance (and there would be hundreds, if you really open it up) pull data from every other clone... no way. And DNS is not a model for pushing data...

To make one thing clear: I agree with Marc that twitter needs to be decentralized in some way... I just don't feel that DNS can be the model for it.

2 comments:

m3 - Martin Leyrer said...

What about the Usenet model?

Quoting from Wikipedia:
"... there is no central server, nor central system owner. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Roman said...

martin,

same, same.
The usenet was not able to send a msg within subseconds or seconds...

roman