dan.benyamin.org

I am not a twitter user, as my stimulation / activity ratio is already waaay too high the way things stand, but I sure do get a lot of secondhand twitter smoke. Just wading through techmeme and techcrunch to find stories not about twitter being down is getting tiresome…

So why hasn’t someone developed an open source Twitter? It seems like a natural direction — twitter is a communications system, and a fairly generic one at that. A great idea (not sure if it is a great business), and one of the best ways its users can ensure its reliability and uptime is to reverse engineer it and license it under open terms. This would not only allow for a distributed system that would naturally scale, but would allow the protocol to be picked upon and augmented/improved as need be. Really a similar history to Gnutella – if Gnutella was kept under wraps there would be no way that it would power the majority of all P2P traffic on the web.

This is a short post and I’d love to do more research, but thought I would throw the question out. I won’t pretend to know the technical details of twitter, but I honestly can’t see any other viable outcome…

(Image courtesy of luc legay)