Open Source Tweeting

Can we liberate tweeting from Twitter? It's an open question. And it's one that Dave Winer hopes we can answer, in response to his post We need: An open source Twitter shell. He begins,

It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface.

What Dave proposes is decentralized, open, and adaptive in ways a centralized proprietary platform like Twitter can't be:

let’s create an open source client that can be repurposed in as many different ways as we, as individuals want. Some of us may want to do deals with Twitter Corp, and that’s fine — but others may wish to embark on paths that are independent of Twitter. They wouldn’t try to guess what would make the platform vendor happy, and instead follow the grain of the Internet, or go where the users want to go, or some users, or to scratch their own itch. Some may want to be part of the Cathedral and others part of the Bazaar.

Dave isn't sure yet what it should be. Maybe some readers can help. For now, Dave writes,

Probably a JavaScript framework that comes with a Twitter timeline object. So displaying a timeline is automatic as are the user interactions. So any kind of client, one written in any language — Python, Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP, C, etc — could store data in it. It wouldn’t know anything about the Twitter API. It would be up to the applications to put data in the structure.

It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface. It would, of course, be programmable through a user scripting language.

Having this one component would let a thousand flowers bloom in exactly the place where we need them to bloom. The key thing is to find out what would happen if we could take a path that was not designed to please the platform vendor. Note I carefully did not say “to piss off the platform vendor.” I really do mean to chart courses that are independent of the vendor.

There's more. Read the whole thing. And let us know what you think. Or, better yet, how you can help.

Bonus link.