Getting a fail whale this morning again on Twitter.

SMTP never gave me a whale. Nor has POP3, SSH, XMPP or any of the other protocols in the Internet Suite.

Twitter is a brilliant invention. It is also not quite a walled garden, which is good. But it's a private service with many single points of failure owned and run by one company. (Am I wrong? Could be. If so, tell me how. I'm here to re-learn.)

Being able to use other companies that do similar things (e.g. identi.ca and FriendFeed) is good, but not good enough.

If tweeting is something that ought to be Net-native, then we should find a free and open way to make it so.

Laconica, used by Identi.ca, is a free and open microblogging platform. But is it enough?

Not sure. Seems we still end up with dependencies that make services like Twitter (and even identi.ca) not quite what we need.

But, I dunno. What do ya'll think?

[Later...] Read down. Evan Prodromou of identi.ca and laconica explains how openmicroblogging is the protocol I'm asking about.

And read this post by Dave Winer. The money quote: "It's time for a thousand Twitters to bloom. The mother ship will do great, but we need a path that's independent of the corporate entity that runs Twitter."