June 16, 2008 21:08 | WebBlogging

Distributed and federated "microblogging"

What you need:

- a CMS

that allows posting entries
-- via quick-post form
-- instant message
-- text message (how relevant is this in iPhone + unlimited 3G data world?)
that outputs
-- an ATOM feed of your posts
that handles quick authorization and authentication requests
(so that if your feed isn't publicly available, your friends can put in a request to follow, with their OAuth or OpenID or other credentials, be given a unique RSS feed URL, and as soon as you "accept" them they start getting your posts. Until you authorize them, the system throws an HTTP 403. If you deny, 404.)

- an aggregator
that allows quick subscription of other's feeds.
-- auto submission of OAuth or OpenID or other credentials
-- respects HTTP error codes etc which indicate state of relationship ("404 - I've denied your master, remove their submission to follow me from your queue. They can always try again...")

etc etc

There are issues with this of course. And I am full aware that it is essentially what we had before Twitter, except we used blogs and aggregators and wrote more than 140 characters... Conditions where not right for this to develop this way, but perhaps they are now?

There is at least one other person who is sensing this desire (Evan Prodromou):
http://laconi.ca/
http://identi.ca/

Update:
Aaaaand someone's already started work on a spec:
http://openmicroblogging.org/

Whoop whoop and more:
Prototype for distributed / decentralised microblogging using semantics