Micro-blogging
I have been following and participating on Twitter lately and can see real value in the communication on twitter. Many folks including myself poo-pooed twitter, but after taking a second look and participating in the conversation I am starting to like it.
I started out just following a number of Internet Famous folks, but after a while I dropped a large number of them because they had nothing to say and were boring me. After Podcamp I added a number folks who were at Podcamp and this is were my participation and conversation has really risen. I heard about TweetDeck at Podcamp, installed it and find it a great interface for following twitter conversations.
Last weekend I also created an Identi.ca account and hope to setup my own Identi.ca installation to see how useful it could be at MIT. I am curious about the flexibility and security around this distributed solution. My interest in Microblogging started last month when I heard Joe Cascio’s Distributed Micro blogging talk at Ignite Boston, and then again when Joe gave a similar talk at Podcamp Boston 3. I like the distributed model of Identi.ca, as it pushes the load out to the edges of the network, however I as others have said, we need more than just a distributed model, we need some sort of glue or federation that allows all distributed installations to communicate together. Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed) outlined Federation on the Louisgray.com blog. Rob outlines how federation is more important than just distribution ...
Federation is different from distributed in one simple sense. Federation requires a full copy of the entire system. Federation is the cooperation between various systems to act as one. .....
The one part of the federation that is missing is the routing between servers. This can be accomplished by following the DNS model. A local DNS server has a reference to its parent or master server. This allows new servers to be built and their location and IP address propagated to other servers. This is a very effective solution and it has worked for several years.
However, my thought is that we need both a distributed model and some sort of central federation, much like DNS which uses both a distributed model within each domain along with a central (federated) root-server for directing DNS traffic to the correct authoritative domain.
Twitter's poor reliability has lead many to start looking for other alternatives, and I would bet on some sort of distributed model, federated or not to gain some ground in this space.
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