[rottendevice]

Who would host the servers though? A standards organization? I doubt they could afford it.

That, or it will be like email, where everyone has @example.com appended to their username.

Neither situation strikes me as desirable.

[chunkbot]

In the future, it's quite likely that a standards organization could afford it.

Processor speed, disk capacity, network bandwidth, and available software are all growing much more rapidly than online populations.

In some years' time I might be able to run an operation like Google, Facebook, or Twitter from my bedroom.

[qq66]

There are theoretical lower bounds on the amount of heat generated by the kind of information processing that Google does, and this heat needs to come from energy sources, which are growing more scarce as software/bandwidth/disk capacity/CPU speed grows. Google is the largest non-manufacturing electricity buyer in the world and would never fit in any bedroom :)

[eru]

The current Google perhaps, but not the Google of the future.

[chunkbot]

I'm not sure I want the Google of the future.

[bluelu]

1000 tweets (maybe with metadata 1 KB) are juts 100 KB/s traffic (if compressed). You could stream this from one of the smaller ec2 instances.

[aheilbut]

I think it will be a lot like email - what is undesirable about appending a domain? That's how the internet works.

[alextgordon]

You mean, with all the spam?

[wmf]

Fortunately tweeting has the concept/expectation of following (whitelisting) and email doesn't.

[alextgordon]

Only if you've protected your profile/using private messages. I regularly get @replied by people who I don't follow, and I don't particularly want to lose those messages, so it's probably not a realistic way of stopping spam (although it would certainly be effective).