I’ll start with the punch-line: Decentralisation is not the solution to scale a service like Twitter. Those who suggest it are not getting the bigger issue. Twitter is not about the service, but the experience. Its ability to initiate conversation between people is amazing. It’s been defined in many ways. Some call it micro-blogging, while others call it life-streaming. In fact, Those who call it a social “network” are not that far off. Twitter leads the services supported by the lifestreaming aggregators, which shows that socially, it’s the most used on the web.

Twitter, the evolution

I see Twitter as a natural successor to weblogs. One that cuts out the noise and actually focuses on the point at hand. You don’t need to specifically go to a person’s blog to see their updates, because those updates come to you. You don’t need to read through long posts of 400+ words to understand what they are trying to say - they come to you in 140 characters or less. You don’t need to fill out forms to give your comment on what they said - an @reply is all it takes. It is moderately analogous to social networks because your Twitter page acts like a normal “profile” on sites such as Facebook. The only difference being that your profile changes with every update, and because these updates are spontaneous people always get the “correct” view of you. No pretence, no put-ons to get more people to connect and show off your network of “friends”. Here, followers follow you if they want to (similar to feed subscribers) but don’t get in your way unless you follow them back. People can see who you follow and judge your interests from that list as well. Twitter truly brings the human factor back into digital social networks today.

Decentralising such a simple yet effective concept will not only reduce it’s value, it will effectively kill it. People might argue that with Twitter’s scaling issues it will actually be a welcome change from the downtimes and freedom from dependence on fragile servers. As has been noted, there is no relation between a solution to Twitter’s scaling issue and decentralisation. Social networks in general might even if broken apart and spread throughout the Internet, but Twitter won’t.

One main reason is that, like I said, Twitter is the natural successor to weblogs. It is so because it brings all the conversation together, instead of having people jump from page to page, link to link to keep up with the discussion. If Twitter were to get decentralised, we would be going back to that same model. It would take one party - like a Friendfeed or Socialthing - to aggregate the different conversation feeds and make sense of it all. Or the individual person would need to subscribe to the feed of each person he wants to follow (which is what we do with blogs today). My point is, a decentralised Twitter is what we left behind 2 years ago. Decentralised Twitter is what Tumblogs (kinda) are¹.

Being a part of Twitter is like being in a room always filled with people you want to listen to and talk to. If someone shouts at you from the other corner, you can still hear it, because you’re in the same room. Decentralising it will be the equivalent of putting each person in their own room, and having the people you want to talk to on conference on your phone. It’ll make it easier to be in your room, but harder to follow conversations.

Laissez faire

Twitter needs optimisations to scale properly, which are constantly being done in the background. The system is so large, that by the time one problem is solved, a couple of more pop-up. You’d think getting acquired and being boosted by servers like Google’s and Yahoo’s would be the answer to their problems, but I hope they don’t get bought.

Twitter is perfect the way it is, downtimes and all. Use their APIs to pull your data out or push them in if you’re are worried about losing out when they bonk. It’s an awesome service the way it is. I’d say just leave them alone and let them do their thing.