This is yet another bath time ideas. How can we replace Twitter with something that is not rocket science? I think we can simulate Twitter using IRC. And these are how:
- Each user will be given their own room. So, if I’m neofreko then I’ll have #neofreko
- Twitter bot join every user room
- Who following who will be kept in a dedicated database
- Each time user post a message in his (or any) room, twitter bot will relay this message to other user room based on the who-following-who database
- User can leave their room so they may have been replaced by a bot as well. We may want to keep an alias table for user-bot and real user
- This user-bot will “provide” web-based UI so user is not required to join the room but, still, can access their room from external world. Accessing here may mean: views archive, views replies, and sends messages
- Twitter bot can keep all recent messages to build the public timeline
So, now we have
- Other can see my twitter page by visiting my room, or accessing the web-based UI.
- At any given time there’ll be at least two user instance in any given room, ie: user-bot and twitter-bot
- No, the room won’t be available on public. Instead it’s only available in twitter LAN(d). Thus we can prevent evil bot from joining.
And then we must consider
- Netsplit issue. IRC wizard please confirm this: will this problem gone is all user coming from localhost?
- Security. Whether this IRC is vulnerable
Now, who want to fund me?!