layout: post title: Twitter is Jabber created: 1179209977 categories:

• Dave Winer
• jabber
• SMS
• Twitter
• XMPP
• Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

OK, I finally lost it when I read Dave Winer's post re: Twitter premium:

Jason Calacanis is known for stimulating interesting discussion. Today is no different.  

He says he'd pay $100 a year for a Twitter that was always fast, almost always up, and had some additional features. 

I sent Jason a private email which I'll now repeat here. 

Just FYI, because of their API, you don't really need Ev and Biz to do that for you. A bunch of us could pool resources and set up a server of our own, and peer with Twitter's. If Twitter is down it would just queue up the messages, in the meantime, anyone who was on the premium system would see the messages immediately.  

 Look: forget Twitter. It has a bunch of users, that's about it. How to build twitter:

1. Install Jabber server
2. Install SMS gateway
3. Done

That's about it. And it has a publish and subscribe architecture built in, rather than all these crazy desktop apps that constantly poll the Twitter mothership. That's it. It's simple.

"Peering with Twitter". WTH. Built into the XMPP protocol. It's a standard. Works with lots of other things already. 

My only explanation for the Twitter craze is that North Americans are still enamored of anything that can do the tiniest bit of mobile integration. Yes, Twitter has managed to scale and spend many thousands of dollars paying for SMS gateways. Great! Maybe if they had built a front end on top of Jabber, they would have gotten there faster...

/me shakes head 

Update: Dave links back and explains that the number of users that have adopted Twitter is important. So...yes, I agree, I mean, I help build community sites for a living. So why are we talking about building an ecosystem around a company? Jabber would allow everyone who wants to build a real coral reef...one that doesn't rely on body of a company in the middle.