Over the last few days a number of popular bloggers have complained, loudly, that it’s time to ditch Twitter and move to a decentralized version of the service that won’t go down every time usage spikes. Generally services like Twitter, once they reach a critical mass of users, can’t really be stopped because the network effect kicks in as a massive barrier to entry. But one aspect of Twitter – it’s openness – could also be its Achilles heel. Scott Hanselman mused on how such a system might work yesterday. Dave Winer has also written extensively about this, although he’s more focused on simply backing up Twitter messages so that they are still available when the site goes down. He isn’t paying attention to the real benefit of Twitter – the spontaneous, asynchronous conversations that pop up between every changing groups of people. Instead, he just wants to make sure the data is secure. Marc Canter also weighs in in a surprisingly lucid post. Infrastructure needs to be decentralized to be reliable, he says, pointing to DNS as an example. Decentralizing Twitter isn’t about having backups of content if the service goes down. It’s about making sure that the service as a whole can’t go down, and allowing all those conversations to continue unabated no matter how popular the service gets. Here’s How To Decentralize Twitter Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability and founder of startup Faraday Media, thinks he knows one way Twitter can be decentralized effectively. The key weakness in Twitter (and therefore opportunity for a new decentralized approach) is the fact that so much Twitter activity occurs off Twitter.com. Users are getting very used to using desktop clients (Twitterific, Alert Thingy, Twhirl, etc.), IM, SMS, and other interfaces to talk to Twitter. Those third party applications can be tuned to lock in to the new decentralized Twitter-like service instead or in addition to Twitter itself. Users on the new system will post to a microblog. Third parties can create platforms for these blogs, and have them be certified as compliant with the microblogging standard – posts of 140 characters, no titles, etc. Users could also install compliant software on their own servers – much as they do with WordPress.org today. There would certainly be an open source project around this shortly. The hard part is putting these microblog posts together into a Twitter-like conversation where people subscribe to → Read More
Faraday Media will today launch a new sidebar based version of attention management tool Particls, as well as a new attention platform Engagd. The Particls Sidebar provides a same attention feed based information as the Particls ticker; a personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to the user online in real-time, but in a sidebar. The Particls sidebar is a welcome alternative to the previous product that is bound to find more fans, although those fans will be restricted to Windows rat this stage. A TechCrunch themed sidebar can be downloaded here. The new Engagd is billed as “the first ever standards based, open Attention Platform.” Engagd is said to turn Lifestreams into APML by using APML to create ranked/filtered feeds. Engagd allows users to subscribe to filtered feeds in any standard feed reader to help with information overload. Engagd though isn’t for the average user; the product is aimed squarely at Developers of apps, mashups and “savvy early adopters.” → Read More
Attention management ticker Particls from Faraday Media moves from private testing to a full public beta launch today. Particls is an alerts platform that conveys attention data. Particls evaluates incoming information and ranks it based on “Personal Relevance”. Particls then uses an “Output Adapter” that provides only the amount of attention required for the relevancy of the alert based on a policy of “Diminishing Attention Consumption”. In layman’s terms, Particls displays news it thinks a user will be interested in based on history, feeds and a list of keywords. Think a smart RSS reader that scrolls on your screen. Setting Particls up is fairly straight forward. Buttons are immediately integrated at a browser level and adding feeds, keywords and filters is simple. Customization options are extensive but are not for the non-geek inclined; there’s too many options and it’s raw data driven, no user friendly WYSIWIG color charts or sizing options. The results are exactly as promised. Items of interest are scrolled based on your attention preferences, and the ability to tweak priority allows for extensive filtering that delivers relevant and topical news. Particls offers free API access to developers and publishers are able to customize Particls with co-branding and site specific data. For those interested in trying Particls a TechCrunch flavored version is available for download here, Windows only at this stage though a Mac version is planned. Whilst the technology behind Particls alone should make for a compelling service, the format is not going to be for everyone. Tickers are a love them/ hate them thing with little middle ground. For those on the love side of the ticker debate, Particls may well become a must have for the desktop. → Read More
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