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 those writers they like, can respond via an “@[username]” mechanism, etc.

This can’t be done efficiently just via RSS because rapid and excessive polling would bring servers to a halt. Instead, Saad thinks wrapping RSS in XMPP, an open standards based instant messaging protocol that was originally created for Jabber and is now used in various applications including Google Talk, is the answer. XMPP allows for pushing of messages to subscribers, which removes the need for constant polling. For more of Saad’s thinking, see his site on their product SyncStream, and they’ve already written code that will do this based on their proposed standard called “GetPingd.” Twitter uses XMPP in their API already; third party applications like Google Talk integrate with Twitter via XMPP already.

If users begin to “twitter” using this new system, applications like Alert Thingy can simply add it to their functionality. Instead of using Alert Thingy to sign into just Twitter, you would also create an account at Alerty Thingy, too, which stores your subscription lists. This is analogous to what feed readers like Google Reader do today with RSS subscriptions.

XMPP already has a mechanism for tracking subscribers which performs the same funtion as the “followers” list in Twitter. Users can therefore have a list and count of followers back on their microblog.

Handling replies is a little more complicated (the @[username] feature on Twitter). One way to do this is to use the existing RSS infrastructure specifically with Google or Technorati Blog search to monitor for @replies and feed this to the user applicaitons. Results wouldn’t be limited to just microblogs, but I’m not sure that matters. It would also be simple to block spammy stuff by simply clicking on a button, the same way Twitter works today.

The net effect of this theoretical platform is to move the publishing to a completely decentralized network, and move the hard part of Twitter into the third party aggregators (which is already a competitive space). There would be no one central bottleneck that could fail.

Twitter (the company, the service, the site or the software) isn’t part of this new decentralized platform, of course, so they’ll oppose it. But can it happen? Absolutely, because it doesn’t require a hard reset to a new Twitter-free world. Existing Twitter clients could add support for GetPingd and the rest of the infrastructure and it would work seamlessly with the existing Twitter world. Anyone could create a website that duplicates what Twitter does today, but supporting the new decentralized framework. And a limitless number of microblogging applications could emerge to join in the fun.

And we’d never have to deal with outages again.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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.”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

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