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It's time for Twitter to fly the nest
Jan. 8th, 2011 08:55 pmThe intertubes are abuzz with the US Department of Justice's subpoena of a bunch of Twitter account details (signup stuff and DMs for a range of folks including non-Americans). It's time for Twitter to stop being a service and grow up into a protocol.
Twitter's run in the US, and so is subject to US legal and political shenanigans. They're generally good folks (which is how come the story broke: they told their users) but they are still subject to US interference. If they were elsewhere, all sorts of international jurisdiction issues would apply, and we would have a situation where intensely privacy-friendly jurisdictions (traditionally Sweden, say) would be more attractive as Twitter hosts. Plus, with more than one corporate player, our precious ability to tell each other about our cats and workouts and Justin Bieber are much more robust too. If AOL buys Twitter, we can see the fail coming and move to EuroTweet or TweetRu or wherever.
This incident serves as a high-profile poke to the deep geeks: Get your RFC hats on, and build the cross-server interaction rules that allow tweeting (that'd be short-form stateless real-time text messaging with user identifier and other metadata) between orgs. The world will be a better place for it.
Twitter's run in the US, and so is subject to US legal and political shenanigans. They're generally good folks (which is how come the story broke: they told their users) but they are still subject to US interference. If they were elsewhere, all sorts of international jurisdiction issues would apply, and we would have a situation where intensely privacy-friendly jurisdictions (traditionally Sweden, say) would be more attractive as Twitter hosts. Plus, with more than one corporate player, our precious ability to tell each other about our cats and workouts and Justin Bieber are much more robust too. If AOL buys Twitter, we can see the fail coming and move to EuroTweet or TweetRu or wherever.
This incident serves as a high-profile poke to the deep geeks: Get your RFC hats on, and build the cross-server interaction rules that allow tweeting (that'd be short-form stateless real-time text messaging with user identifier and other metadata) between orgs. The world will be a better place for it.
