Decentralized Microblogging

Yesterday evening I found a very interesting new research paper (via the Twitter search for ‘RT microblogging’). It was presented by Daniel R. Sandler at IPTPS09 on 21 April and deals with decentralized microblogging:

Daniel R. Sandler and Dan S. Wallach. Birds of a FETHR: Open, Decentralized Micropublishing. 8th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS ‘09) April 21, 2009, Boston, MA, 2009. [BibSonomy: microblogging p2p] URL

Wow. At first that was quite shocking as one of my current research projects deals with the same thing. On the other hand it is great to find researchers with the same interests and thoughts. And: a nearer look at their work shows that they have a different solution for the same problem.

The first part of the paper is a great motivation for decentralized microblogging. They show the disadvantages of Twitter’s monolithic architecture and I strongly agree with them. However, their solution is a new protocol, ‘FETHR’, which has to be spoken by all applications in their decentralized microblogging space. Further, via FETHR the microblogging postings are sent to the subscribers (rather than fetched by the subscribers).

Personally, I strongly believe that the big advantage of microblogging is its characteristics of blogging enhanced with a social network (following/followers, @-refers, replies) and combined with the publish-subscribe-mechanism. There currently exist wide-spread standards in the web which could help us implementing decentralized microblogging. In my opinion there is no need for a new protocol.

However, they wrote a great paper, they go in the right direction and they were the first to publish their approach. Kudos! I am looking forward to future discussions on the topic!