Mike Arrington and a number of other A-listers are proposing an open source, decentralized version of Twitter, to improve performance:
"And we’d never have to deal with outages again."Twitter Can Be Liberated - Here’s How
Yeah, because it's not like Skype ever went down.... oh... um... wait... nevermind.
What Mike also fails to realize is that growth of the network and adoption is critical to a social service as well. Consider Jabber. How many new Jabber client downloads have their been in the last year compared to AOL, Yahoo! or MSN Instant Messenger? Twitter has enough of a challenge crossing over into the mainstream and they're a for-profit company that's going to eventually do more co-marketing and biz dev deals. How many users besides Mike Arrington and Dave Winer do you think this de-centralized, open source Twitter is going to get?
Echo chamber FAIL.