Last week's denial-of-service attack that knocked Twitter offline was aimed at one man — a blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia called Cyxymu. Nonetheless, it caused the entire Twitter universe to blink out of existence for hours. This struck some detractors of the service as hilarious (how do "these people" complain about Twitter being down if Twitter is down?). But the truth of the matter is that Twitter is an increasingly important lubricant for greasing the wheels of the web.

Twitter has a measurable effect on how fast information travels online, and when it's down, the information-time continuum slows. For instance, YouTube told us that their popular videos are getting popular faster now than they used to - a phenomenon to which Twitter almost certainly contributes.

Twitter — or, rather, the idea of a pervasive, public short messaging network — could be too important to be left under one entity's control. The people behind the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) movement say it's time for the 140-character, publicly-subscribable format pioneered by Twitter to become an open standard, in part because, as last week's attack showed, Twitter is as vulnerable as it is vital.

"The total failure of Twitter during the DDoS attacks highlights the fact that, with Twitter, we’re relying on a single service for mass communication of this type," said open microblogging supporter and Ektron CTO Bill Cava. "Most everyone understands it’s ridiculous to expect one service to provide email support to the world. The same is true for micro messaging. The reality is, it can't and won't continue this way for too much longer."

The OpenMicroBlogging standard already exists — it's just that Twitter's not playing along, possibly because it could lose market share if the open standard succeeds before it manages to monetize its service. One platform that adheres to the Open MicroBlogging (OMB) standard is Laconi.ca, an open-source Twitter-style network launched by Status.net on July 2 of last year (others include OpenMicroBlogger and Google's Jaiku).

Laconi.ca, which seems to have gained more traction than the other two OMB platforms, forms the backbone of Identi.ca – an open-source Twitter clone with features Twitter lacks (image uploading, trackbacks, native video playback, OpenID) that lets you post updates to its own network as well as Twitter and Facebook. Status.net will soon add the ability to follow Twitter and Facebook feeds using the corresponding APIs, so users will soon be able to make Identi.ca their default short messaging communications hub — even if those services won't use the open standard.

"I think that if Twitter decided to open and be part of an open protocol, that would be a very helpful thing for us," said Status.net CEO Evan Prodromou. "And I think it would be really good for the web, too."

Identi.ca provides the "open Twitter" experience for the regular user. But if you want to take your micro-blogging independence to the next level, port your Identi.ca account into free, open-source Laconi.ca software running on your own server. Essentially, this means you can operate your own Twitter-like network, for free – either a general competitor to Twitter or a microblogging service focused on a specific niche. Examples include the German Bleeper, the Vietnamese Saigonica, and other Twitter-for-other-languages sites, as well as FLOSS (open-source community), TWiT Army (like a whole Twitter network for Leo LaPorte followers), a general interest micro-blogging network called F***Twitter.

For a real sense of the possibilities, imagine a million little Twitters — each of which can post to each other, as well as Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else.

Prodromou, who built Laconi.ca and Identi.ca, estimates that thousands of companies already use Laconi.ca to set up private, company-wide Twitter-like networks, and that hundreds of public sites like the ones mentioned above use it too. His own Laconi.ca implementation, Indenti.ca, has nearly 80,000 users so far and is growing at a thousand users per day.

He plans to make money from this open-source software by offering it as a hosted service, so companies don't have to run it from their own servers, and selling administrative services, so that companies don't have to set it up or run it on their own – a model we've seen quite a bit of lately (Kaltura, GeoServer, Red Hat Linux, etc.).

So far, we-the-people-of-the-internet seem happy to have corralled ourselves into services like Twitter and Facebook, after having been faced with the web's vast, open potential for setting up our own online identities. It's way easier to put yourself online than it was in the old Tripod self-publishing days, but the downside of entering these walled gardens is that when one of them crumbles, it crumbles completely.

Software developer Brian Hendrickson, who runs OpenMicroBlogger.org, a competitor to Laconi.ca, says Twitter represents a new, necessary protocol we didn't even know we needed, but that it's too tied to a single company. "[User] @danyork said 'the popularity of microblogging shows us that we were missing a medium,' and a year ago, a lot of us fans of web standards and technology could sense that Twitter would do what it did this spring: explode in popularity. As someone who has always self-hosted his own e-mail server, DNS server, web server, etc., it was obviously untenable to have every single microblogger in the world using the same web site. It's unnatural."

Other open, Twitter-like concepts are in the works: OpenMicroBlogger, Google's pubsubhubbub, Dave Winer's RSSCloud and Anil Dash's "Pushbutton Web." If this trend towards open microblogging trend continues, in whatever form – and despite Twitter having seemingly every reason not to cooperate – it will no longer be possible to shut down micro-blogging with one or two concentrated attacks.

In a distributed micro-blogging world, last week's attack would have taken down Cyxymu's account — but not yours or mine, in other words. "[Open MicroBlogging] can't be killed," said software engineer Matt Katz, who uses Identi.ca through a FireFox add-on called Identifox, via e-mail. "It is totally decentralized. Imagine trying to take down all e-mail. All you can do is remove nodes."

Certainly, some readers of this article will conclude that it takes micro-blogging too seriously. Why should it be considered worthwhile to shore up with open standards and distributed nodes a platform rife with messages like "OMG! I ate the bestest bagel EVAR!"?

The answer is that Twitter continues to prove its usefulness for relaying key information quickly, as it did during last month's Iranian protests, the Hudson River's second-to-last aviation disaster, and any number of other major, minor and inconsequential events. Something that powerful could — and, perhaps, should — be decentralized, as Prodromou and others suggest, because fun and jokes aside, losing access to our public short messaging networks is no laughing matter.

See Also:- Denial-of-Service Attack Knocks Twitter Offline (Updated)