The conversation a couple of weeks ago about decentralising twitter, and the various ones earlier about how to scale twitter missed this point entirely. Twitter should be 'architected' (what a horrible word!!) as multiple indexes against a table of messages - martin english

I don't think you guys understood the discussion -- the question was how do we communicate when Twitter is down. If you have a solution that doesn't involve decentralizing off Twitter, I'd love to hear it. "Wait until we get our act together" isn't a good answer, btw. - Dave Winer

Now, we have friendfeed :) Seriously, fixing twitter won't prevent EVERY failure, but it will prevent some of the more obvious problems with response and missing tweets. But I just thouight of an interesting question.... There may be opportunity costs to not using twitter (everyone else is and thats where the buzz is), there's no outlay to twitter - What right do we have to demand an answer from THEM (twitter, i mean) ? - martin english

Exactly right. We don't have the right to make demands. That's the problem. We shouldn't ever be in a situation where we are captive to a single company. That's why the Internet boomed in the first place, because the companies that held users captive didn't understand, care about, or listen to their users. This is a classic case. Oh the users don't understand. But wait a minute, yes we do. - Dave Winer

When Twitter is down we use ham radio! - Jim

and then there's the whole Ariel Waldman thing which has nothing to do with architecture. - Thomas Hawk

Microblogging is not the same as messaging. Even the @ links, being seen by friends, are different from messaging. Twitter is something new. That's why we care. - Jonathan Leavitt

I'm just glad it's being talked about as much it is. I expect great things to come out of these conversations. - Bwana ☠

Twitter provides contact, which I have in email and IM. Friendfeed provides conversation, which is less common. Especially considering the quality of conversation I'm privvy to in FF. - Jack&Cleo

I find it amusing that there is not a single comment (at this time) on Fred's blog but 9 comments on FriendFeed already. - jho

I'm telling ya, this place is great for discussions! - Bwana ☠

I honestly don't think it would be that hard to teach the Twitter clients to rollover to using FriendFeed when Twitter goes down. - Dave Winer

blog comments are dead. The real conversations are happening here. I'd like to turn my entire comment system on my blog over to the friendfeed link that accompanies it there. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, I don't doubt that FriendFeed will, at some point, provide a Disqus-like interface. But comments are not dead, at all. They're thriving. It doesn't matter "where" -- there is no where. This is on a hard disk somewhere in some colo. Who cares where it is. Here we are. That's all that matters. :-) - Dave Winer

Geez I'm starting to sound like Scoble. - Dave Winer

What I would like to see is for FF to group conversations together when multiple people post the same link. Right now I'm seeing more than one thread pop up. - jho

Dave, I agree with you. I meant to say comments on blog silos directly are dead. They will still happen sure, but the conversations here are much more engaging and interactive. I get 5 comments here for every 1 I get on my blog. Plus with my blog I have to moderate to prevent spammers who spam my blog with hundreds of spam comments a day. A FF plug in for my blog comments would be ideal in my opinon. - Thomas Hawk

Video comments? On FF? http://tinyurl.com/5gclyy - Jonathan Leavitt

Don't tell Loic! hehehe! - Susan Beebe

@Jim: that was what I compared Twitter to today! - edythe

could we all ask FF to send these comments to me via Disqus. i wouldn't have even known about this discussion if dave winer hadn't pointed to it on his blog. not everyone uses FF. that's the point. some read blogs, some use Twitter, some use FF. they have to work together. i like the discussion of my blog posts to at least be available to the people who prefer to follow the discussion on my blog - Fred Wilson

I think there's a bit of hand waving going on when we talk about a decentralized "message buffer" to layer on twitter for when it's down. What percentage of the twitter population needs to be on it for it to be worthwhile? 10%? 50%? If the primary benefit of using Twitter is the audience that follows you, when Twitter goes down and 80% of the audience vanishes, what's the benefit of continuing the discussion? (Although posting on twitter does feel like talking to yourself sometimes) - mikepk