What Twitter gave us is wonderful, but we should strive to re-create the experience outside, in the wilds of the web, where no one but the government controls what we do (that's bad enough). I see a lot of people rushing to FriendFeed to replace Twitter, I find myself wanting to do it too, but it has the same danger. It's not just about keeping the servers up. Centralization is inherently dangerous. Not saying we should do anything other than think and keep our eyes and ears open. - Dave Winer

You can say limited abilities again. - Andrew

as someone who's twitter account is currently entirely broke, and feels like she's been put on mute, I'd have to agree. - Erin @queenofspain

I don't get why people put all of their messages into one service. I have most of my Tweets linked up through ping.fm that posts them to multiple services, not just twitter - Chacha102 via twhirl

chacha it's a time issue for me. twitter was the fastest and easiest. was looking at others, but didn't have the time, like a real early adopter might, to get into a bunch of other things. - Erin @queenofspain

I agree. its annoying when you know about all these services, or might not know, and then if you don't have enough time to figure out if it is a waste of time or soemthing acctually useful, kind of just stops you from trying the beta stuff. - Chacha102 via twhirl

Erin, I think you're missing a bit of Chacha's point. While it's true that keeping up with every new service is difficult/impossible, Chacha was speaking more to the fact that services like ping.fm allow you to "spread your bets", so to speak. If you post at a site that posts to other sites for you, you can focus on the site you like, but still have a presence at others. That way, if you have to switch, you're not completely starting from scratch. There's still network disruption, but it's lessened. - Ken Kennedy

Dave, "Centralization is inherently dangerous." tell that to the honey bee !! But seriously its not bad, if all users in utopia mode :)-. I believe that the expectations of society in and by itself needs to change. The greed for materials and money is the shortcoming of humanity. As you walk thru The Corridors of Time o you will certainly see that humanity comes together and then breaks down b'coz of ego and greed. Technology hives are no different. I agree, FF, Jaiku, Pownce all have the same dilemma !! - Peter Dawson

I wonder whether it is not possible to establish an open format for microblogging and especially commenting. Subscription and specialized search engines should be enough to follow conversations. is that too naive? - Heinz Wittenbrink via twhirl

centralization is very bad. Vote Republican... we aren't for the single government corporation. Put your vote where your mouth is and don't support the brown shirt Palestine supporting National Socialists. - NoahDavidSimon

if you think internet tyranny is bad for your comments... just wait for the reality tyranny to come knocking on your door. It is called Obama and it smacks of internationalist tyranny. - NoahDavidSimon

Here is the funny part. All the Comments in Friend Feed are all in a Single Basket. I like the fact that FriendFeed Aggregates all of your content so that the acctually sharing is decentralized (You have a list of your shared stuff on Google Reader and Delicious, etc) But all of the comments you post up are completely on FriendFeed. Is that going to be the next step? Maybe allow all of your comments to be hosted on your blog and then aggregated? - Chacha102 via twhirl

If we allow "the government" to control what we (or corporations) do, there will never be a "bigger and better" version of Twitter. - Craig Eddy

I'm sorry, but this is crap. One poorly designed application architecture isn't a call for large-scale revolt. Blah, blah, blah. I'm so beyond tired of the whining and bellyaching. If you have a better idea, then build it. If not, then quit complaining about it. It doesn't accomplish a thing to sit and bitch. - Cyndy

Twitter down doesn't bother me much since I only use Twitter a few times per day, and I use it for different reasons and with a subset of people that don't -- and I suspect won't -- use FriendFeed. So, my messages are strung across services: friends from high school use MySpace; friends from university use Facebook; friends from India use Orkut; other friends use Twitter; strangers I talk to use FriendFeed; etc. That's why I scoff at the "email is dead" notions -- email doesn't feel fragmented to me. - Kirk Kittell

Yeah, his brand of "IT" = "Internationalist Tyranny". Got that right. - William, CPU Media

Well this really isn't a big revolt. It a bunch of people coming to realise that keeping all of your content in a single area prone to crashes is really a bad idea. - Chacha102 via twhirl

Chache -- that's exactly what I'm saying. - Dave Winer

I wish I could string those services together... - Kirk Kittell

@Kirk I doubt email will ever really be dead. Kind of like Postal Mail Today. Its the backbone communication system that you know is almost always reliable, aand for the most part private - Chacha102 via twhirl

BTW, since you use twhirl, I'd like to point out another way we can get safer. If our clients create an archive of everything you do, but not on Twitter or FriendFeed, that's a good way to: 1. Recover if the system you're using fails and 2. Encourage the development of parallel systems to do innovative stuff with our tweets and FFs, etc. If you think it's a good idea -- send Loic a message. He likes video messages, I hear. :-) - Dave Winer

My last comment is a big one guys. If we can get users to ask Loic for this feature, I promise -- developers will be able to do cool stuff with it, and not just guys who can keep huge honkin servers running. You'll see an explosion of new creativity. - Dave Winer

I'm always amazed when I read comments like this. Twitter is a free web service that no one forces you to use. The original premise was "What are you doing ?" so it was just a bit of fun. If you base your business/web presence/your indentity on Twitter then you are in trouble. A decently hosted website and email are the most important things for your activity on the web. - Paul Nash

I hear ya Ken. I guess what I'm saying is I didn't know about Ping or others until well...now. - Erin @queenofspain

"A decently hosted website and email are the most important things for your activity on the web." Yup. And make sure you have an office with a pretty receptionist. And take out some ads in the Yellow Pages and the local TV stations, too. And hang a shingle. ;-) - Josh Bancroft

Dave has an important point regarding archiving (no matter how you define it). Tweets and FF shares and comments now contain interesting info and pointers to more of the same. So keeping a record of these could be important. - Bill Anderson via twhirl

"so keeping a record of these could be important. " - yeah google knows everything :)- - Peter Dawson

I agree on the concept, definitely. Jon Udell has been evangelizing these concepts as well for awhile; a good overview here, called "Hosted Lifebits": http://blog.jonudell.net/2007... - Ken Kennedy

@Paul Nash I understand your point but i still disagree. web 1.0 was about one person on an island sending out bottles via email lists. Web 2.0 is about a NET of networks intertwined and dependent on each other for communication. p2p is the backbone for today's successful technology and even though twitter is centralized, it also plays a huge part in a how to business model. the discussion here is amongst content publishers and we need twitter or something like it to function properly, imho - Anthony Farrior

I'm not sure there was some huge downside to embracing Twitter. The conversation has moved to FF almost instantly given their reply problem over the past week. It seems to me that the zero switching cost of the interwebs is in full effect here. - Jason Calacanis

Hey so what the hell? Peer to Peer twitter. let's code. - bugtank@gmail.com