| I've been having a server "always on" at home since the early 2000s (in the 90s I would've run a BBS if not for the fact that Norway have never had free local telephone service -- and we only had the one phone line). If I used that availability to host a web page and/or receive email via smtp -- such services would certainly be handled handily by a solid-state disk and an arm cpu -- maybe a rasperry pi? Or just a cheap, rooted, android phone plugged into the charger. Then I'd have redundant networking (4g and wireless to my adsl2-line -- shouldn't be too hard to whip up something that would work, perhaps using the android scripting framework [1]). Currently I use it to have access to some of my (personal) files, schedule/check on downloads and updates, and haven't quite been able to whip my providers broadband router into shape (the box tends to go flaky every 7-10 days of uptime, probably due to buggy wireless) -- so it's nothing I consider "service grade" right now. But distributed twitter done right, with several layers of caching (see the Fielding thesis on REST [2]) -- shouldn't really need much in terms of traffic to host my tweets/updates. I still think an smtp/mailinglist/uunet/usenet design would work/scale better though. But then how would we track users, spam them with ads and monetize something that takes so little infrastructure to run in a decentralized manner that there is no real need to monetize it? /rant [1] http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
[2] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm |