especially considering that not too long ago, he was quoted arguing that he could not adequately provide for his family if the town of Medina limited his house to 13,500 square feet.

so, allow me to make some suggestions:

twitterritory could represent your circle of followers and followees. just hope Blake doesn’t come to your twitterritory and fire your ass.

twitterrain well, we all know the twitterrain is a bit rocky.

twitterrible has been brought up. i like to apply it to people using obnoxious memes like REDACTED and unicode characters.

twitterracotta would give a nice spanish colonial look. it’s a hot style right now with people possessing absolutely no interior decorating taste whatsoever.

twitterrycloth is nice and soft. very absorbent.

twitterraçe (said with spanish accent) might be a good name for a condo complex where single geeky men live (a la “the fiesta terrace“).

twitterrier find a backyard breeder and we can sell dozens of these dogs. warning: narcoleptic, and prone to biting.

this last one is a bit of a stretch, but:

twittyrannosaurus would probably make a more appropriate error page mascot than the failwhale.

why their approaches will not work

people are thinking of this as a web problem. twitter is not a web problem. the trouble begins when they try to use web for something it was never really meant to do.

twitter is a one-to-many architecture trying to be a many-to-many distribution model. they are the hub of a really massive wheel that will eventually shear clean from the axle upon which it spins. what we really need is a tried and proven way of doing many-to-many distribution of real-time data.

real-time data

realtime data is not a web idea. the web is where data gets stored and presented; it piles up like old newspapers until we finally get around to bundling them up with string and hauling them out by the curb. the best the web can muster is near-real-time. how fast can you grab a feed, how often do you reload your browser.

realtime data is in a protocol, a network. if you want to store it, figure that out later. how you will present it, figure that out later. separate the distribution of data from its presentation and lifetime. deliver, then present. (then store).

distributed delivery? scaling? network: IRC

the model of the IRC network is as near as perfect for ephemeral data as one can find. and it’s been proven for decades. nearly infinitely scalable to users (add more servers). geodiversified locations for servers. short messages being sent to #channels on particular topics (sound familiar)?

the huge, glaring, and supremely important difference is this: the people responsible for the network absolutely and completely do not care about the lifetime, storage, or presentation of the data. they are only concerned with distribution.

people on individual channels consume the data and if they choose to store it, they do so (irc logs pile up like their homonymous wooden cousins). they read new information in real-time. they extract quotes and publish them to the web. they compile statistics and publish them to the web.

the model for scalable, many-to-many distribution of real-time information is IRC. now we need to think about the format. plain text is fine for console jockeys (myself included) but the web crowd is a bit more sophisticated.

universal, portable, adaptable information format? data: ATOM

we need a data format that is extensible beyond the author, title, and content. we need something that’s nationally agnostic, can be extended to support geo-location. what more needs to be said? it’s sophisticated enough for 140 character messages, that’s for sure. i know my twitter homepage looks like a graphical IRC client with the addition of user icons. mix in a bit of latitude and longitude and now we’re talking.

more about why their approaches will not work

i think the main reason why nobody thought about this yet is that they’re all too young, too new, and too enterprising. i’m probably guilty of that too. i’ve been sitting on this idea for several years now, trying to find a way to build a business around it.

everyone is thinking “what can we invent?” because invention nowadays equals entrepreneurship, venture capital, business success, cars, romance, glory, and all the spoils. (or some subset of the above).

nobody makes (legitimate) money from IRC. if you talk to an IRC operator (the administrators responsible for maintaining servers), you will find that their personal contributions, if calculated in billable hours, would be tremendous (enough to purchase some of the aforementioned entrepreneur’s bounty).

forget free lunch

we’re thinking: how can we get rich, or at the very least, eat lunch, by solving a problem. our “forefathers” in the internet world as it were, hadn’t concerned themselves with such things. they typically had corporate benefactors who paid the bills, but they were free to invent protocols that fixed a problem and met a need, without regard to how to patent, market, and monetize them.

bottom line: in order to “decentralize twitter” you need to separate the network for data from the presentation and storage of data.

Updates:

Scott Hanselman touches on this idea referencing Russell Beattie’s Peep using Jabber as a distribution model. i hadn’t read a lot about Jabber, but it’s interesting. i still think these guys are too web-focused, but keep an eye on where they run with this. they’re starting to see the light.

“one of the problems in the world is there are no more neighborhoods in the city and neighbors and things like that, but the feeling of the WELL is that you’ve got a lot of neighbors, and you don’t go to borrow a cup of sugar, but you get some information. and information is probably the sugar of the late 20th century.”

if Information is the Sugar of the late 20th Century, i think Information might be the Crack of the early 21st Century. originally we sought it to achieve something; to scratch an itch, to get high, or to get work done.

now we can’t quit it, even when it’s no longer productive, or even when it’s destructive.

Joel johnson, of Dethroner and Boing Boing Gadgets, was planning on spending the week in the woods with all sorts of high-tech gear run from solar power. he ran into a problem with the flow of electrons, and is considering packing it in. the quote?

No need just to stay out here enjoying nature with no internet.

read more about his plight over @ BB Gadgets

why keep this one-dimensional?

every now and i again i’ll become dissatisfied with my organizational scheme in google reader, and i’ll throw out all my tags/folders/labels/whatever-they’re-called and start over. but i noticed that i kept switching between 2 major organizational schemes:

1. context

2. importance

usually when time is more compressed, i re-arrange based on importance. throw away the fun stuff, read the essentials.

when time is available, i group by “architecture” “gadgets” etc.

today i did both. google reader lets you assign any number of tags/folders/labels/whatever-they’re-called to any feed. so i left them organized by context, but added “recreational” to the ones that i can skip when time is short.

now when i’ve got lots to do (like shovel, and paint. ugh.) i open ‘recreational’ and mark all read. then i take bite-size pieces of the essential stuff when i can.

the most important one is that you become your brand. every person who has a blog, a homepage, or uses a social networking site, should be thinking about that right now. you may not be famous, or infamous, yet. but someday you might be.

take for my first example, DVD Jon. you know, the kid who cracked the blah blah blah on dvds. he didn’t control his brand. whether he chose it or the media chose it, he will forever be “DVD Jon.” (e.g. the recent engadget article that gave me this idea).

it reminds me of the movie “Hackers.” Johnny Lee Miller’s character (been enjoying Eli Stone, btw^[1]) starts to try to explain his situation, his background, and his experience. he stops, and in a defeated tone, simply utters “i was ZeroCool.” and his peers in the room instantly got it.

Jon Lech Johansen has moved on to writing software that does other things to mp3s, iphones, etc. but you know someday, while trying to tell people about the software he’s written and the coding techniques and whatever else, will probably have to break down and say … “i was DVD Jon.”

[1] sorry ABC, when you have auto-playing embedded video+audio ads that i can’t pause or shush, i don’t link to you directly.

i was watching the moderately-local news this morning, and the big lead-in to the (alleged) Microhoo! story was “Microsoft may enter the world of online search engines” by purchasing Yahoo.

now, i know it’s just a hack local newscast, but that’s also entirely my point. if a newsroom full of people, probably some who were actually issued the aforementioned IT managed workstations, don’t know about live.com (nee search.msn.com) or worse yet – don’t consider it even a participant in the “world of online search engines,” then there are 2 questions: 1. how much does it cost to keep the lights on @ MSN Online, and 2. can programmers work in the dark?

wired gadgetlab: Fujitsu’s P1620 Subnotebook Is Everything The Air Isn’t

first of all: write original stories. kthx.

second, you’re comparing a sub-notebook tablet equipped with an 8.9 inch screen, to a laptop that has a 13.3 inch screen. they’re not even in the same category. they’re barely in the same genre.

what’s next? the Nokia N800 weighs a tiny fraction of what the Macbook Air does! and it makes phone calls! haw!

why? it defeats the auto-capitalization for text fields that they won’t let me give me a mechanism to turn off. otherwise you (well, I) end up typing your (my) password twice when you (I) realize that the first time – it capitalized the first character in your case-sensitive password.