Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem
Uh, DNS is too hard for most people. So is maintaining a web server. If you want any kind of reliability you're going to have to spend 10/year on domain name, 15/year on good DNS server, and 10/month on web hosting. That's $145/yr. Users can use twitter and facebook for free.Besides, the general public can't even use HTML well, so what chance do they have with xml?The other compelling thing about twitter is that 140 characters thing. Blogs enable people to train-of-thought-rant for pages before making their point (if at all). Tweets, on the other hand, force people to think and condense before writing. That's an awesome feature for readers. Also, twitter makes it very easy to follow and unfollow.