Guess I’m as puzzled as Doc as to why twitter needs a control point. This from the man who said we each control our data.

Lee: Right now, with Twitter, I follow you that Twitter controls the point of — it takes your updates and broadcasts simply. If I lose you, then I don’t receive your updates anymore. But if we try to decentralize this, and I just kind of subscribe to you, how do I tell you that I want to receive your updates? How do I tell you that I want you to broadcast to me?

This is no problem. Replace “updates” with “email” and the answer is obvious. Further P2P file exchange seems to happen in quite a decentralised way, to the fury of incumbent distributors. How hard would it be to have a P2P client (locally or in the cloud) that use a bittorrent type of protocol to distribute, tweets, files, status, presence, favourites, etc. etc.

We certainly don’t need MS’s “mesh.” It seems too star for my taste.

1. Micro-blogging can be generalized to PhotoBlogging or Blogging or MusicBlogging or whatever you want. I’ll stick to discussing micro-blogging for the purpose of this discussion, but don’t stop at Twitter.

2. If you have real-time feeds available from all micro-blogging sites (twitter.com, jaiku.com, pownce.com, scripting.com, myrandomasssite.com, etc) and they’re push based, building track on top of that platform is limited only by the volume of messages you’re able to process. I should know, I built track for Twitter. In about 12 hours last September.

3. Twitter is extremely open as far as data exchange / portability / whatever you want to call it. You can ask, and they’ll give you a full, real-time feed of every single public twitter update. Q: How far is it from being able to subscribe to a given user on Twitter, through a syntax like blaine@twitter.com? A: Not very. As in, about a line of code. The problem: authentication / authorization and user interface. Period.

4. Roughly 3/4 of requests to Twitter are API requests (i.e., they don’t show up in Alexa or Compete); the amount of energy expended on handling those requests, combined with the amount of energy expended on creating those requests is extremely high, and grows faster than linearly (i.e., more people on the system means more polling per user). How much power is there in data centers: not much. At some point, using asynchronous methods becomes a major competitive advantage, and companies can start profiting from carbon offset models, rather than paying for them.

Anyhow, if you think the various components in Twitter that promote open exchange of data are accidental side-effects, think again. Ralph Meijer (formerly of Jaiku) and I successfully demonstrated federated micro-blogging between Jaiku and Twitter using XMPP at the Social Graph Foo Camp back in February. Obviously I can’t speak for Twitter’s current interest, but when I left they were interested in the direction (think: smaller fish, bigger pond, brand and technology leader).

There are a number of people working on seeing this happen, and for more things than just micro-blogging. In my opinion, it would be unwise to ignore the ramifications of an RSS-like network that is (1) real-time and (2) addressable.

But, yes it would be nice to have an easier way to follow a threaded conversation in twitter.

And last but not least the Irony of Dave Winer’s decentralize statement is that when he shut off blog site switch his own service they routed around that vendor. Probably being honest about that particular aspect of his point might have made the point more solid

The prototype uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, their properties, account and service information, and the microblog updates that users create. A multitude of publishing services can ping one or a set of aggregating servers as selected by each user, and it is important to note that users retain control of their own data through self hosting.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote an interesting blog post on Monday about a “decentralised Twitter”, which was picked up by Dave Winer, Marc Canter and Chris Saad amongst others.
I’m happy to say that we have recently described a…