Till now we are only aware of Linux rules but thanks for giving the knowledge about exposure of Linux.

I haven't quite figured out why Twitter is so popular. Dang kids, get off my lawn.

I love microblogging and think it will become a mainstay of the Internet. I however don't think Twitter will be that mainstay. I think Doc Searls was close to the point when he talked about smtp and pop3. Justin is right that Twitter is not a protocol, however if we go with the e-mail analogy for just a bit one can start to see where the problem lies. The current Twitter model is like having all e-mail, everywhere, run through one huge server. If that server goes down NOBODY has e-mail. When you compare this with the distributed nature of (most) other services on the net you can see the difference. If my ISP's mail server goes down it is a local problem not a global one. Also due to the prevelence and interoperability of smtp/pop servers I can still send e-mails to all my friends I just have to use a different server until my ISP gets their mail server back up. Turning the outage into a minor annoyance.

I think the Laconica model of microblogging, or some ancester of it will be what survives. The federated nature Laconica means that anyone can set up their own microblog. And their microblog will interact with all the other Laconica type micro blogs. So if I have an account on two Laconica type microblogs it's suddenly no biggie if one goes down I could still microblog from the other if it were a long outage I could send @ messages to friends informing them to follow my second feed.

I think it is this distributed nature that microblogging needs. Especially as it becomes more "important" in our lives the need for a faut tollerant system will pretty much demand it not be centralized.

Just my 2 cents
Freemor

Doc, you ask, "Laconica, used by Identi.ca, is a free and open microblogging platform. But is it enough? [...] Seems we still end up with dependencies that make services like Twitter (and even identi.ca) not quite what we need."

One thing that makes Laconica different than Twitter is that it supports a federated mesh of interconnected servers. Users on the Twit Army site, or Bleeper, or any of the other public servers that run Laconica, can subscribe to the notice streams of users on Identica (and each other, of course). A poster's service pushes their notices out to the servers of all subscribers to get near-real-time conversations.

The protocol we use is called OpenMicroBlogging. It has at least one other implementation, and we're actively lobbying Open Source and proprietary software developers in the µblog space to support it. Version 0.2 of the protocol is under active development.

If that sounds familiar -- it should be. We have a similar model with SMTP and other Internet email protocols -- people have one or more accounts on your own trusted servers, and those servers deal with the inter-site protocols.

Why isn't this more popular, then? Well, for the most part, because people who know better continue to use that monolithic SPOF system. What Identi.ca, and Laconica, need are advocates like you. You know that this is the Right Way to do it. And you know that walled gardens and a single points of failure aren't healthy for a growing network. You've been involved in FLOSS for a long time, so you know (and perhaps relish) the anguish of using an unpopular but superior program. You're ready to make the jump!

If you're not interested in having a presence on Identi.ca, we'd be happy to set up and maintain a dedicated Laconica server just for you. You'd be an awesome test case. If it makes it easier: we've built-in some tools to make it easy to maintain a presence on Twitter while doing the Right Thing.

Let me know your thoughts -- I'm very willing to help if you're willing to take the next steps.

You make a good point - if the service is as all-pervasive as it's made out to be, it should be more stable.

However, you make a distinction as well that I think puts the issue into a clearer light: You've never gotten a fail whale from any of the protocols you listed, but surely you have from a service using those protocols. POP3 & SMTP might not fail us, but Gmail does sometimes. (As do all the other mail services at one time or another, regardless of whether they're free or pay, web-based or desktop.) SSH doesn't fail, but the specific server you're trying to sign into can and eventually, probably will. The protocol doesn't fail, the service using it does, and if that happens, you can choose to use a different service using that protocol.

Twitter is no different. Twitter isn't a protocol, it's a service. It's not SMTP or POP3 or SSH; it's a private business running a website that offers a service, and it's as vulnerable to failures as any other website. The protocol, if that dynamic is to be applied to Twitter, is "microblogging" itself. Microblogging didn't fail, just like POP3/SMTP/SSH didn't - a microblogging service did. Identi.ca and Plurk and FriendFeed and all the others are examples of other services using the microblogging "protocol" - they're the Hotmail/YahooMail/Mail.com to Twitter's Gmail, the server2/server3/server4 to Twitter's server1. You might go on (as though I haven't gone on enough...) and make the comparison to "regular" blogging - Twitter is to microblogging as Wordpress, for example, is to blogging. Wordpress.com might 404, but that doesn't mean blogging - as a protocol - failed.

I think Twitter should be more stable - and they do deserve credit for having stabilized the service a great deal. Still, they have millions in venture funding, some of which they just closed on, that could be being used to add infrastructure and manpower where necessary. If they're going to be the canonical example of microblogging, they've got to do more.

Justin Ryan is the News Editor for Linux Journal.
Look for him in the #linuxjournal IRC channel.