7th
Info Condom
The recent suffering of Twitter and Facebook (and others apparently) at the hands of a huge DDOS is just one more reason to disapprove of centralized, single-source, non-federated services: They are vulnerable to just this sort of thing.
A system of federated presentation services and many Banks of Content would be far less vulnerable. Oddly, this is a well known lesson and a fundamental piece of the architecture that underlies the internet. However it is a problem that is far easier to solve at the level of technological interaction than at the level of social interaction.
One of the appeals of Twitter and the like is that you can experience moments like this: “I’m on Twitter! ZOMG are you on Twitter too!!?? You totally have to get on twitter and then we can be on twitter together!”.
That’s far more fun and engaging than: “I propagate my microblog content by URI from my robust distributed content store to multiple presentation services, it would be great if your microcontent could co-mingle with mine on the open internet and together stimulate the generation of new knowledge.”
(Actually that sounds really sexy to me, but I’ve been told I’m a bit strange.)
