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4 comments:
Well - there is an open twitter - and it is called jabber (or XMPP). It just needs something to show the status updates from the web ;)
The future of the Internet is bound to be owned, then? Funny to think where we've arrived at after the openness of HTML...
@scribe : I always think the *web* (not necessarily *internet*) is by nature a "middle-space" somewhere between centralized and distributed (it has large centres even if no absolute centres).
Centres tend to have owners just like any other node. It's just that in very distributed networks, we don't care about ownership because no particular node has a lot of power.
The biggest, most gravitationally powerful centre of all, of course, is Google. Twitter is another strong centre. Centres are useful ... they can do things (mainly aggregate / reduce information ) cheaply that's impossible or too expensive to do in a completely distributed way.
Twitter is a "matrix" matching all followers with all followeds which is something that doesn't have to be done at a centre but was probably easier to get started with one. (Consider that P2P also tended to start with central brokers between users, and BitTorrent is only slowly moving away from dependency on important "trackers").
But, ultimately unless Twitter goes in for some "reduction" as well as "mapping" it can and will get decentralized to a certain extent, @zby's probably right that something like XMPP could do most of the work we'd need from the protocol side.
We're already moving the rendering from the centre to dedicated clients. Some clients will grow to handle more centres than just Twitter, they'll weave multiple lifestreaming servers together and post to multiple "ping-servers".
XMPP plus RSS
or how about just SMTP? :) Each person has an email-list. You want to follow someone, you join their list. Only the list owner can post to the list.
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