Twitter, Reliability and Decentralization

January 17th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized |

As you may know, I am a big fan of Twitter.
Recently, during Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote, many Twitter users wanted to share
their thoughts on the keynote as it happened, unfortunately, Twitter was unavailable
for most of the time that Steve was on the stage and for much of the afternoon following.
This is not unusual for Twitter, their servers seem unable to cope with the stress
of high volume events. Of course, developing any website to handle this stress is
difficult, so I cannot fault them. The problem is that the community is locked into
using the same site for all of our Microblogging. It is possible that everyone would
switch to another service such as Pownce,
but as with Twitter, there is no guarantee that the new site would be any more reliable.

Russell Beattie posted a good idea, using
instant messaging clients as our Microblogging system. He suggested that we have
a bot on our IM list that automatically repeats to our full IM list, all messages
we send to it. There could be multiple services that offer bots that do this, and
if they all support a common IM protocol, there
is nothing stopping us all from using different bots.

This would solve the problem of having all of the conversations muted, when one service
goes down. True, if one bot goes down, its users would be silenced, but they could
move onto another service quite easily.

Now, we have to see if anyone will implement this as a solution to the problem.