Re: Twitter and Iran Elections

Hi Harry, everyone,

it would become hard to take down if it would be more distributed, analogue to 
distributed file sharing. I am thinking of the approach that DiSo (distributed 
social networking, [1]) is going. That could be as extreme as -- also 
up-to-the-minute -- Opera Unite [2], i.e. hosted by the users themselves. Opera 
Unite based Microblogging, hey that's cool! ;)

Cheers,
Alex

[1] http://diso-project.org
[2] http://unite.opera.com

Harry Halpin wrote:
> I'm sure everyone has now heard about the roll Twitter is playing in
> the current protests in Iran (apparently 15,000 tweets an hour, which
> I'm trying to follow rather unsuccessfully). In particular, it has
> received lots of news coverage [1] as Iran has shut down Facebook [2]
> (although apparently now access is unblocked, which should be familiar
> to those of us who remember Iran filtering Orkut.
> 
> This got me thinking of the importance of open social networking and
> open micro-blogging, and how if these technologies were more widely
> people in Iran might not have such a precarious grip on what are now
> clearly important journalistic and political tools - after all,
> Twitter would have gone for scheduled maintenance apparently, leaving
> some of its users in Iran without Twitter, had it not been for
> intervention by the U.S. Yet, would it not be better to have a
> technical solution rather than rely on the U.S. govt. asking Twitter
> not to postpone their maintenance?
> 
> So, to sketch a use case - how can investment in such an open stack
> help people not have their social web services so easily shut down,
> either inadvertently (such as when a server crashes) or on purpose
> (such as a government using the domain name system or legal threats to
> shut down a single social networking or blogging site)?
> 
> I'd like to hear thoughts, and especially links to enlightening news
> stories or use-cases?
> 
> [1]http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/twitter.iran.tweets.2.1046306.html
> [2]http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2009/05/iran-ahmadinejad-islam-facebook-social-networking-mousavi-tehran.html
> 
> 

-- 
Alexander Korth
alex@ttbc.de
m +49-1577-1704501

Received on Tuesday, 16 June 2009 18:58:05 UTC