People spending (a lot of) their time on Twitter are coming up with more and more ideas.
Open P2P Distributed Twitter
Russell Beattie talks about an open Twitter:
The idea is to create a Jabber bot which you and friends can subscribe to which will pass messages back and forth between yourselves and Twitter, and hopefully be able to connect somehow in a P2P way with other bots as well.
Russell is also proposing some proof-of-concept code written in Python
The idea is further detailed by Scott Hanselman who’s asking why is microblogging centralized?
According to Scott:
Twitter is IRC, it’s IM, it’s chatrooms, but ultimately it’s just microblogging with a multi-format API.
It is too early to comment if this P2P Twitter proposal will finally lead to something.
Twitter in schools
Another idea is exposed in the 13 pages paper published by Timisoara Politechnic University professor Carmen Holotescu and Gabriela Grossek, dr.lecturer at Sociology and Psychology University. The paper is writen in Romanian and its title is: Possible Microblogging usage scenarios in education
The authors are listing 16 different possible usage scenarios, most of these being the common scenarios that we’ve already got used to and just a few minor ones being more oriented towards educational purposes.
In the paper, Carmen and Gabriela are mentioning Twitter but in the end they are pitching on a local clone of Twitter that has been launched a couple of months back and that is targetting the Romanian users.
One last thing: even if lately there have been rumors about Twitter abandoning Rails, Evan Williams is the official voice that is not confirming it.
Update 1: This post was prepared during the weekend. Today TechCrunch has published a good summary Twitter Can Be Liberated – Here’s How
Update 2: Russell continues his research in this direction, as shown by a couple of his latest twits
Is there a PHP clone of Twitter (i.e. a microblogger) out there already? It seems like a 20 second thing to do.
Any solution that requires a Jabber server or dedicated bot just isn’t going to get far. Simplicity wins every time.
Update 3 It looks like the right column reference to my Twitter account is not really effective, as I’ve received a couple of emails asking for it. I am LeMec (you can add me as a friend)
mindstorms 