Dave Winer recently made a call for an open source twitter shell, which he suggests be perhaps done with a javascript framework to let any site act like twitter.com. Many people are interested in this sort of suggestion, because while the folks at twitter.com are generally well loved and felt to be good actors, many people fear that no publishing system that becomes important should be controlled by just one company.
For success, such a system would need to be as easy to use and set up as twitter for users, and pretty easy to set up for server operators. One thing it can’t do so easily, alas, is use a simple single namespace the way twitter does. A distributed system probably has to make names be domains, like E-mail addresses. That almost surely means something longer than twitter names and no use of the @name syntax popular in Twitter to refer to users. On the other hand almost everybody already has a domain based ID, ie. their E-mail address. On the other hand most people are afraid to use this ID in public where it might get spam. It’s a shame, but many might well prefer to get a different ID from their E-mail, or of course to use one at twitter, which would now look like user@twitter.com to the outside world instead of @user within twitter.
Naming problems aside, the denizens of the internet are certainly up to building a publish/subscribe based short message multicasting service, which is what twitter is using terms much older than the company. I might propose the name MSM for the techology (Multicast Short Message) read more »