JoeCascio.net

I want to quickly set down a high-altitude view of how I see a Distributed Twitter working. This should give you the basic concept, which I’ll then elaborate in more detail in subsequent posts.

First of all, let’s call it something more generic. I like Distributed MicroBlogging or DMB. The “Distributed” part is really the key. Unlike a centralized, proprietary walled garden system, DMB would be spread out over hundreds or thousands of different servers over the internet.

Just like email or Jabber, anyone could run a DMB server. People would register on a particular server with their OpenID and create or contribute to microblogs that other people could follow, ala Twitter. Note that people are different than microblogs as entities in the architecture. This is somewhat different than Twitter, in which there are only user accounts. This allows a form of the long-sought groups feature, implemented as microblogs that many people can contribute to.

So, people contribute to microblogs that are followed by other people. When someone updates a microblog, anyone on any server that is following (ie subscribing to) that microblog will get the update in whatever client they have running when the client fetches it. A Twitter-like client will display the posts from many different users interleaved in chronological order. Some clients could maintain a “live” real-time update, where other clients could display only on demand from the user, like the Twitter.com home page.

That’s another important point. The DMB architecture, like Jabber and SMTP, does not specify any particular user interface. How the microblogs are presented is up to a UI designer. The architecture only specifies what data are interchanged, not how it is presented.

So, that’s a very simple explanation of how I see a Distributed MicroBlogging working. There could be large public servers like Google or small private servers for individual companies or groups of people. A server could host hundreds or thousands of microblogs and users, or just one microblog with a single user.
I can envision a given individual’s domain delegating its microblogging functions to a larger server, much as an individual’s home site can delegate its OpenID functions to a large identity service company.

Next, I’ll talk about the single most challenging implementation problem for DMB – notification. How does a DMB server notify other following servers that a change has taken place on one of its microblogs?

Tags: distributed, microblogging, twitter