FETHR, an Open-Source Twitter Protocol

Daniel Sandler leads a research project on transforming microblogging from a service (Twitter) into a protocol.  His analogy of CompuServe mail’s evolution (an original “Email™” service) into a general e-mail protocol (SMTP) is helpful for putting this in context.

Part of the difficulty in explaining Twitter is that people think of it as a website rather than a mode of communication.  The evolution to an open protocol is natural, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been more openly discussed in tech and VC circles.  (People instead prefer to ponder whether Twitter can ever live up to it’s alleged $250mm valuation.  Unless some global microblogging consortium buys them out, I doubt it.)

  • His beautifully-designed FETHR presentation. [PDF]
  • Birdfeed, the “prototype implementation of a RESTful, interoperable, Internet-scale microblogging protocol, tentatively called Fethr (Featherweight Entangled Timelines over HTTP Requests).”

[via Andy Baio]