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Why decentralizing Twitter is so important

Sunday, May 04, 2008 by Dave Winer.

A picture named redflag.jpgAt 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. Permalink to this paragraph

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.  Permalink to this paragraph

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. Permalink to this paragraph

This is just plain unacceptable.  Permalink to this paragraph

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. Permalink to this paragraph

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

Update #1: A new web service for Twitter clientsPermalink to this paragraph

Update #2: Marc Canter checks inPermalink to this paragraph




     

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A picture named dave.jpgDave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Last update: 10/20/2008; 8:22:33 AM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."

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