Sean Reiser

OK, last night I wrote a piece on RSSCloud in which I touched on the 140 character network and what I was doing to implement it. A few non-propellerhead friends sent me IMs last night not getting why a loosely coupled network is important, which is OK I didn't do a good job of explaining it. Today we are getting a practical example of why it's important.

There had been a DDOS attack on twitter, facebook and livejournal which is showing the real weakness in centralized networks. Outages effect a large swath of people so when you attack twitter you get attention (same with FB and LJ) so it's a tempting target for vandals. No one's going to take pride in being able to take down my server which sites on a shared host.

Imagine that there were hundreds or thousands of "twitters" which talked to each other, just like email. When your personal email goes down, you company's probably doesn't. Gmail doesn't have any effect on yahoo mail. That's the way the loosely coupled network works. Your servers may go down due to a failure or an attack but it will come back check in with other cloud servers and get what was missed, again just like email. Of course not everyone would run their own server, but companies and service providers would as would "roll it yourself geeks". At the end of the day that's the only real way for these status update systems to be successful.