What if there existed a Twitter-like technological entity, split into two parts, which together formed a virtual democratic republic.
1. The "community", comprised of those persons and corporations reading and writing messages ("tweets"), un/following each other, forming groups, etc. Both individuals and corporate entities could/would pay for the RESTful server infrastructure powering the basic messaging service.
2.The elected "governance body" which is in charge of:
* A massive geo-weighted DNS round-robin, so the service can operate under a single domain name.
* A system of caches, e.g. a bunch of varnish instances spread across datacenters around the world.
* A lightweight, tiered push-notification system which is orthogonal to the RESTful service, and allows clients to request that they be notified when, say, a timeline-resource has been updated; and also allows the server endpoints to originate notifications of updates.
* Authoring and updating the specifications for protocol support, message format, message signing, media type definitions and semantic profiles, and data replication between servers.
* The "laws" which govern the process of joining the community (e.g. agreeing to messages being under some creative commons license); having a server/s added to the round robin; kicking a server/s out of the round robin for some violation of the specs and laws (e.g. message tampering); banning a user-entity for spamming; and so on.
At regular intervals, the worldwide community would elect members of the governance body. Over time, the specs and laws of the service would evolve -- as a result of the elections, popular demand and technical problems and innovations.
In the beginning, the governance body, specs and laws would be established by the founding participants, to avoid a chicken-and-egg scenario.
---
Here's why I see this attracting interest of corporations and thus motivating them to pay for the servers and develop/deploy implementations of the technical specs:
All sorts of companies would love to analyze the firehose of public messages being pumped through Twitter (or this hypothetical service). They would also like to data-mine the timeline histories. Twitter is more and more making that a difficult and costly proposition. By participating in the infrastructure, companies and individuals would automatically have their own views of the firehose, and could choose whether to invest in the tech to keep the historical data beyond some minimum amount mandated by the specs.
In turn, such infrastructure participants could resell access to their views of the firehose and/or historical data to those who can't or don't want to run servers but are interested in exploring the data. Thus a market would be created, and there would be a healthy amount of competition among infrastructure participants regarding the prices of firehose/history access and the APIs they make available for tapping into those paid resources.
1. The "community", comprised of those persons and corporations reading and writing messages ("tweets"), un/following each other, forming groups, etc. Both individuals and corporate entities could/would pay for the RESTful server infrastructure powering the basic messaging service.
2.The elected "governance body" which is in charge of:
* A massive geo-weighted DNS round-robin, so the service can operate under a single domain name.
* A system of caches, e.g. a bunch of varnish instances spread across datacenters around the world.
* A lightweight, tiered push-notification system which is orthogonal to the RESTful service, and allows clients to request that they be notified when, say, a timeline-resource has been updated; and also allows the server endpoints to originate notifications of updates.
* Authoring and updating the specifications for protocol support, message format, message signing, media type definitions and semantic profiles, and data replication between servers.
* The "laws" which govern the process of joining the community (e.g. agreeing to messages being under some creative commons license); having a server/s added to the round robin; kicking a server/s out of the round robin for some violation of the specs and laws (e.g. message tampering); banning a user-entity for spamming; and so on.
At regular intervals, the worldwide community would elect members of the governance body. Over time, the specs and laws of the service would evolve -- as a result of the elections, popular demand and technical problems and innovations.
In the beginning, the governance body, specs and laws would be established by the founding participants, to avoid a chicken-and-egg scenario.
---
Here's why I see this attracting interest of corporations and thus motivating them to pay for the servers and develop/deploy implementations of the technical specs:
All sorts of companies would love to analyze the firehose of public messages being pumped through Twitter (or this hypothetical service). They would also like to data-mine the timeline histories. Twitter is more and more making that a difficult and costly proposition. By participating in the infrastructure, companies and individuals would automatically have their own views of the firehose, and could choose whether to invest in the tech to keep the historical data beyond some minimum amount mandated by the specs.
In turn, such infrastructure participants could resell access to their views of the firehose and/or historical data to those who can't or don't want to run servers but are interested in exploring the data. Thus a market would be created, and there would be a healthy amount of competition among infrastructure participants regarding the prices of firehose/history access and the APIs they make available for tapping into those paid resources.