a simple way to decentralize twitter, and why we need it

Once of my biggest problems with twitter is the fact that twitter is centralized. This means that content I give to twitter, and content I receive from twitter both go to/come from the same place. This sucks.

Once twitter goes down the service is completely unusable. This is totes mccraps. My solution: let the twitter api change the data source from twitter to a 3rd Party source. It would look like this:

request for tweets from twitter -> if twitter not hosting then forward request to 3rd party site -> 3rd party site publishes tweets

This way I can run my own twitter server for my friends and myself. All my friends need to do is log onto twitter through my site and my site automatically changes their data source from twitter to my server. They then can trust their data to me instead of twitter. It is much less likely that I will go down since I know my load will never peak, unlike twitter which doesn't know their load and will keep breaking like it does.

Twitter can still own the data if they want(based on their terms of service they can still grab it and keep it). But they don't have to be responsible for it, which they shouldn't be. It's your data, you should be able to decide who's responsible for it. I can make the same claim to facebook, but they have too closed of a philosophy to ever change.

This could also help innovate your social graph. Following friends could be expanded to following the people on your server. It also would make creating social apps over twitter much easier for developers by giving them unlimited access since they would be able to run their own servers.

Twitter's servers would still be the main key, and they wouldn't lose any power doing it this way. They would be able to offload their processing to other people's servers, saving them money. Makes sense, to me at least.

why google is winning

In the past year or so I've noticed something simple about google's strategy that is going to push them even further from M$ in the coming years. It's all about planning for the future, and not deviating from that plan.

The main examples I'm going to use are search, and android. There's a concept of once you're the king, it's extremely hard to be overtaken. M$ has done this with the OS and Google with search. Unless you can do a massive leap frog over the king, there's almost no point in throwing a crap load of money trying.

M$ has been trying to do this with search, but they will never win. I'm sorry, but M$ has not showed in the past that they are smart or clever enough to push any massive feature list that will get the masses to switch from google. They had the wrong mindset/business plan and in the end bing will fail.

Google, on the other hand, has the right mindset. Their mindset is on the future, and the future for the web is mobile. This, I believe, is the number 1 reason behind Android. Google creates this great mobile operating system, that hardware venders can use for free, and boom, Google owns search on any mobile device that uses Android (along with all the other mobile OSs that use goog for search).

Google now has the last laugh as they become the king of mobile search, while M$ is trying to play catchup with something Google perfected over 5 years ago.