[BerislavLopac]

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure

I think this is the most important point, one that most people -- Twitter included -- seem to overlook or ignore.

What we need is an open Twitter-like protocol -- but for it to be successful it should be peer-to-peer, not server-based like Twitter. A few year ago I was working on a startup which would build precisely such a protocol, but my partners backed out before we could lift anything off ground.

One of ideas was to make the client double as a Twitter client, in order to attract a wider user base. This would be less viable now, with the new Twitter API restrictions, but I would still love to see someone develop something like that.

[huskyr]

Well, there's OStatus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus), which is supposed to be an open standard for microblogging.

[BerislavLopac]

No, it's not quite what I had in mind. OStatus is intended for exchange of updates between sites that have statuses (statii?), while I'm thinking of something that would exchange messages between users directly without the need for a central server (except probably for user discovery and connection).

[tannerburson]

So you're wanting to reinvent XMPP?

[BerislavLopac]

Actually, XMPP the underlying technology we finally decided upon, just before the team fell apart. But the concept was to make a product that is based on it, but with a different feature set from the usual IM/chat clients we see.