From RealTech The Tweet Stuff: When it absolutely, positively has to get there:
If we’ve learned one thing from this week’s massive attack against the very fabric of our social connectivity, it’s that clouds don’t make the best stuff on which to build.
Twitter, in particular, has shown how very vulnerable it is—a vulnerability we share as we become more dependent on Twitter for most of our communication with each other. Oddly enough, I needed to contact someone about a business opportunity just as Twitter universe began to crumble, but all I had was her Twitter name—I couldn’t find her email address. Since Twitter was down, I couldn’t connect up with her for hours.
I spent a happy day playing with code today. The end result is a new “tweet workflow” that could possibly survive the year 2012.
update I’m still getting familiar with the Twitter/Laconica API, but received a message via my identi.ca account from csarven about remote subscriptions. I can subscribe to identi.ca folks, as well as other Laconica sites, using the REST API. For a Laconica site, attach “?action=remoteSubscribe” to the URL, and you’ll get a page to enter the nickname of the person to whom you want to subscribe (at that site), and your remote profile, such as http://laconica.burningbird.net/shelleypowers. Or if you’re not logged into the system, just clicking the subscribe button will open the Remote subscription page, automatically.
Once you enter the remote subscription request, you’re then taken back to your own site, where you have to accept the request. This prevents spamming. Once accepted, when you access your Home location, the postings from your remote friends will show up, in addition to postings from your friends who are local. You can also reply to the individual.
This functionality is also available for Twitter, built-in, but on my system, trying to use it caused errors. This is a known bug and a fix is currently being developed.
This is truly distributed, and decentralized, connectivity. You can’t take a system like this down, no more than you can take all email down, or all weblogs down. Way of the future.
Now, I must find out what other goodies are in the API…