Twitter Outliner Screen Shot

I turned off Twitter updates on FriendFeed. So I'm committed to new tool, even after outage clears.

The problem we're all dealing with, again, is the centralization of Twitter, which usually isn't a problem, but when they go down, it's a big problem.

So I finally decided to do something about it. I created a tool that made it easy for me to author my Twitter stream in OPML, and from that, generate RSS, whcih is then hooked into FriendFeed (they do very well with RSS). The same tool can post to Twitter.

The authoring tool works so well that I was able to turn off the connection betw FriendFeed and Twitter. Now when Twitter comes back they'll get the same feed.

I'm posting in the same volume I was before the outage, and I'm covered against future outages as long as my followers know to go to FriendFeed when Twitter goes down. I will drill this into them when Twitter comes back.

Now I don't want everyone to use my tool, but I suspect this strategy will be employed by the developers of the Air-based tools for FriendFeed and Twitter and even Pownce (whcih is getting pretty good these days).

Let's put some load on FriendFeed and whoever comes along that can play the same role Twitter plays. It's time to decentralize. Really long overdue.