Distributed Twitter

[andrewducker]

Can anyone see a way that a distributed Twitter could work?

Obviously you could use RSS to aggregate tweeters you like into one place - but that only covers very basic functionality.  For instance, I can't see a way to both decentralise it _and_ allow for hashtag filtering over the whole database to find the tweets you like.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[matgb]

You need every producing site to ping every search site.

No, you need to have a couple sites providing a pinging service, like Auttommatic does with ping-o-matic. Then you, the user, chose which pinging service to use.

Which also means they all have to keep track of every search site out there.

No, the pinging service does that for you.

And most blog platforms already provide feeds for a huge number of search services, sort of—every RSS reader in the world is effectively acting as a search service to an extent.

Actually, given that Twitter already has a huge pile of published APIs, and a lot of people are used to using clients already, the impetus for a distributed model is pretty much already there, all it'd need is for Twitter to have an outage and people'll step in.

[andrewducker]

Ok, so DuckerTwitter.Com pings the ping site of its choice, and then the search sites use that as a trigger to come get data from DuckerTwitter.com? Or do I send the complete data to the ping site?