Twitter is not a trivial application to scale, considering the wide disparity in listeners to follower ratios, that views are dynamically generated by interpolating many-to-many message streams, and that each message is persistent forever.

As an analogy, It's like managing an IRC server, with persistent messages that are full-text indexed, with one channel per user, and unlimited number of users can join each other's channels. When you join a new user's channel, your chat log is automatically (and quickly) re-woven with messages from that channel according to relative time series of these messages. And, there's a global channel that everyone can watch to see what any user in any channel is saying at any time.

Now do this, all the while avoiding netsplits (i.e. missing messages), allowing retracts of almost message, recent or historical, and ensuring the channel history (eventually) reflects that change. And handle sudden bursts of activity among unpredictable sets of channels because they're all attending the same conference, or a burst of network-wide high activity because people are watching the World Cup or Obama's inauguration.

The point is that, while the idea is simple, the variability of use and disparity of activity is what makes life interesting; the messaging & DB architecture that works well for recent activity, for example, doesn't help for having reasonable persistent random-access to historical messages.

In all, Twitter has gotten a *lot* more reliable the past several months than it was a year ago.

The reason something like Facebook works is that they can design a database schema to facilitate a complete experience that just kind of... works.... Across mini-feeds, status walls, applications, etc.

Doing that in a way that's completely decentralized requires standardization on interfaces and data that would be hard to do for a couple of reasons:
- Agreeing on the architecture; how many "really" RESTful interfaces are out there? Netflix has a great one, but Flickr doesn't.
- What's the syntax? JSON, XML, YAML, ... ?
- How about a data model? Will people want to go beyond syntax into being able to do queries like what SPARQL gives you?

But beyond the technological hurdles, there's the business angle. Social media isn't exactly rolling in revenue, it's rolling in VC funding at best. Why interoperate when can try to claim a monopoly position? Or aim to be the defacto standard?

So, in the end, I woudn't say we're moving backwards ... we're just progressing through the usual stages of how standards and openness has evolved online. We start with well-funded walled gardens (CompuServe, Prodigy, your local BBS, etc.) , people eventually get fed up and build out interoperable bridges that cross them (e.g. FIDOnet and NNTP in the old days of bulletin boards). Now we have to do the same for the web....

My honest read of the article is:
- cloud interoperability is important (as you say -- XML, BLOB, plaintext, whatever interface is agreed on, though there's a longer discussion about the implications of what you choose on adoption)
- yet there's a "race to the bottom" of creating a lowest common denominator, looking at very complex things like networking equipment, firewalls and load balancers as mere commodities, when in fact they're pretty complicated.
- most of the cloud interoperability discussion is driving for a "high level interface" for developers to access, when what you need is a much more detailed set of metadata to be able to capture the rather more complicated tweaks & configurations.

Interestingly enough, there's already some standards for granular metadata in data centres, like the DMTF's CIM. The problem is that this was more designed to "set state" on storage arrays, switches, and servers, not to be used as "metadata" that is stored and traded around, maybe modified and collaborated on, etc.

It's not about Flash vs. Silverlight so much as this particular streaming technology. They sold the Obama-folks on it early on, and it *happened* to built on Silverlight (MS was an investor in the startup). This technology in my experience has better adaptive compression than the typical Flash streaming (even HD), though I'm not about to claim it will be the only technology that can do this.

In any case, the point is somewhat moot in that a Moonlight-based streaming version seems to be available for LInux and MacPPC users.

SImply put, the FOSS technology sucks. If it was better (video quality / usability, for starters), then people would be inclined to use it.

Issues of accessibility aside, there is a clear technical reason for this choice: the video quality is astounding for a streaming medium.

The DNC website streamed the 2008 convention with Sliverlight technology from Move Networks in high definition, and, from what I can tell, that's the same technology they will be using for the Inauguration.

This is near-HD quality streaming, with adaptive correction (i.e. no pauses to "buffer"). Startup is nearly instantaneous.

Given that 99% of users are using Windows or Intel Macs, and that they need to stream *live*, I'm not sure what open technology you would have them use that has been proven in practice and has comparable quality. You would be basically insisting that the government fall back to the technological equivalent of AM Radio because they haven't published the specifications of how to build your own FM Radio, even though they're giving out new radios at no charge....

So, I don't view this as a mistake, or a screw-up. I view it as a challenge to FLOSS supporters to build a better (or at least, *competitive*) video streaming solution. The freedom to use crap is not freedom.

This isn't a screw up. They just placed higher priority on streaming quality than on accessibility -- especially given there are many more channels to see the inauguration live (TV, Flash, etc.) than this one.

Did you SEE how high quality the DNC streaming coverage was? It was phenomenally good, a leap ahead of the typical Youtube quality.

All right, I believe you.

Yes, I admit my fix fails at grammar. Sorry, where's the edit post feature!? Yar

Detestable? What evidence do you have that this man *set* RIAA policy, rather than carrying it out?

Last I checked, Copyright is still a cherished law of the land outside of Slashdot, and the RIAA had the right to sue people for infringement.

Now, it was a stubbornly stupid move (step 1, kill your customers, step 2, ???, step 3, profit!), but why would specific attorneys be painted with the brush for enacting the policy?

As an example, David Boies was lauded for defending Napster, representing the DOJ vs. Microsoft on Antitrust, yet was retained by the SCO group in recent years. Does that make him detestable?

Only one thing will destroy and probably replace it with something worse our broken democracy at this point -- revolution.

Fixed.