Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:05:00 GMT

Twitter DDoS

Today's DDoS attack on Twitter highlights yet another reason why the Twitter approach to global communications is wrong.  One of the wonderful attributes of the Internet is that it provides a platform that for building distributed applications on.  Commercial operations repeatedly try to build centralized tools on this decentralized system.  These applications work at smaller scales but at a global scale, it is just not going to work well.  It will be brittle and susceptible to a single point of failure problems like DDoS attacks.
Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:52:00 GMT

Twemes.com - Twitter Memes

Over the last couple of months, I've gotten myself into Twittering more and trying to see how this could be a useful tool to me.  I've found that by following a number of prolific Twitterers, that I can keep my finger on the pulse of a number of subject areas.  One of the problems I ran into is that I often feel that I'm missing out on half of the conversation and wanted to easily see the whole conversation around specific memes.  That's when the concept of a tweme (Twitter meme) came up.  A tweme is a tag that gets included in twitter posts about a particular meme.  This makes it possible to look at twitter posts from the perspective of that meme and see what the whole twittersphere is saying about it.

As a first approximation of what viewing twemes would be like, I've create Twemes.com.  Twemes.com shows the most recent twemes as extracted from the Twitter public status stream as well as a "tweme cloud" of the most active twemes.  You can also view and bookmark pages of specific twemes so that you can follow the twittersphere's thoughts on that meme.