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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?

To Jeremy in IM:

You know you’re addicted when your first thought when Twitter is down, is to Twitter about how much more productive you are when Twitter is down.

Some have been thinking about how Twitter will become financially viable. This vision is very believable, with Tweets coming from the flight you’re tracking, your favorite team’s current game, etc. David Chartier of Download Squad offers up some ideas, including a couple from Evan Williams of Obvious Corp/Twitter [via].

I think that the idea that looks most viable to me is something like the business version David espouses, but with an added app-to-app component. Twitter is really a messaging platform - something like the “old” platforms like DCOM or CORBA - but lightweight, subscription-based, and human-readable. It’s similar to enterprise-level RSS platforms life NewsGator’s, but a bit more loosely-coupled, and it has the benefit of the SMS/IM integration in addition to RSS.

With the XMMP integration, any application with an XMPP client could register to receive notifications from the Twitterprise server, and act on those notifications. This might include publishing systems, development build and integration systems, heck, even accounting systemms could get in the game to build expense reports based on incoming tweets.

Of course, the Twitterprise server would become the hub for such things as corporate calendar notifications, IT-status notifications, etc. It is the one-stop interface to subscribe to each service or individual in the company, and notifications can be turned on and off with simple IM/SMS commands as well, making subscription management easier.

So, Ev, what’s it going to be?