B/c Twitter is frowned on at work, I don’t visit and did not know until last night that there was an ongoing outage in progress. Dave has one plan for a route-around, I’ve got another:
It’s been discussed extensively elsewhere, but I’ll repeat it here: I think what might do the trick is to start federating Twitter using XMPP. Twitter uses XMPP internally, and some very interesting federating work was done in the halls at Social Graph Foo Camp between Blaine Cook (Twitter) and Ralph Meijer (Mediamatic). A network of XMPP servers, implementing PubSub (and possibly PEP should be able to subscribe to the message stream from Twitter and vice-versa. Then when Twitter is up, Twitter users can follow me and see my updates, and I can follow them and see their updates. When Twitter is down, anyone on my service or on a peer service will still see my updates.
The competition comes in the form of add-on services/features: Twitter has SMS integration, Dave would probably offer RSS integration (RSS-to-XMPP for example), etc.
So, knowing how long this has been discussed, what’s the holdup?
There's nothing holding this back from Twitter's side. They're making their full stream available over XMPP to pretty much anyone who asks (it's OOB pubsub, but w/e) - they make no guarantees about the service, but it works as of now. Just need other services who want to consume.
Someone from DiSo is working on a XMPP-to-WP posting bot too, that simulates Twitter but posts to a Wordpress blog.
Yes, but to do this right means supporting PubSub - so that a federated xmpp account can subscribe to a published node on Twitter. In this case, I think that Twitter would have to be publishing a node for each user's update stream in addition to the full stream now available.
A WordPress PubSub plugin was recently released and it actually allows to turn every blog into a decentralized Twitter system, but we still need PubSub clients (although there's a Gajim SVN version with a very light support and Synapse-IM, a fork of Psi with a more advanced PubSub support).
Regarding Twitter PubSub nodes, instead of using PubSub nodes stored on their server, it would be possible to allow the Twitter bot to publish on our own PubSub node thanks to the affiliation mode by configuring a PubSub node with those two paramters ('<' and '>' changed into '*' for formating) :
field var='pubsub#publish_model' value publishers /value /field field var='pubsub#publisher' value twitter@twitter.com /value /field
But this would require that Twitter allows this kind of publication and I'm not sure they would want to. It would simply require to enter the name of the node in a Twitter interface.
Addendum : here are some informations regarding the Twitter Jabber PubSub feeds.
A bot subscribed to xmpp:twitter@twitter.com and receiving the ATOM feeds could re-published them on the personal PEP node of a user for example.
Yet another addendum : a web-based PEP aggregator has been released.
This really looks like a personal Twitter page, though. It looks similar to the DiSo actionstream aggregator.