Consider me second to none in embracing Twitter for all that it's worth. But the service's publicized brown-outs naturally raise questions about backup plans in case of further outages. The Gillmor Gang, in particular, has into this question, but the most searching critique I've come across comes from Echovar. It's worth reading the entire post. Here are a couple of excerpts:
It must be an odd thing to run a company in the midst of a debate around the idea of nationalizing your core technology. In a Venezuelan moment, the Gillmor Gang considers the idea that Twitter has become so important that our national security requires nationalizing its technical infrastructure. In a two-part discussion about an open mesh / cross-service dashboard mashups and the roll of Twitter as a sort of fundamental glue, the question surfaced of breaking up the centralized Twitter monopoly."(Thanks to Dave Winer for pointing this out.) Later on, Echovar finishes with this kicker:
The idea of building competitors to Twitter on the same platform, or redistributing Twitter to multiple players reminds me of the idea that New York City should be rebuilt in Ohio because it would be cheaper. Or perhaps we could distribute a little of New York City in every state of the Union. New York City is what it is because of the people who live and visit there. Building another New York City in Las Vegas doesn't result in the phenomenon that is New York City.
This is starting to become a really interesting topic. For the folks over at Twitter, it's time to get out ahead of the discussion.
Forget April Fools' Day, there's real stuff to mark April 1, 2008. Thanks to MUNI, the mechanized joke which is supposed to function as a transport system in San Francisco, I'm late to the game. Anyway, kudos to Anil Dash and the other folks who have weighed in on the April Fools' hijinks. Some are funny, a lot are lame, and most are confusing. (Full disclosure: News.com wiseacres posted a few as well. I think they were OK, but you can judge yourself.)
But if you want to mark the occasion, I would offer two anniversaries for your consideration. In 1976, the Two Steves incorporated Apple in Cupertino, Calif. How big a deal was that? Think of how personal computing might have evolved had it not been for Wozniak and Jobs.
The other is the anniversary of Dave Winer's blog on Scripting.com in 1997. I don't want to get into the controversy about who was first, second...or 98th to the blogging party. But suffice it to say that Winer's writings did as much as any to attract attention to what then was an oddball idea at the time. Nowadays, blogging is a conventional outlet for expression. But if you were paying attention in 1997, few "experts" expected the blog to recalibrate widely held assumptions about online publishing. So much for kowtowing to the groupthink mentality underpinning conventional wisdom.
- prev
- 1
- next
