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RSS Never Blocks You or Goes Down: Why Social Networks Need to Be Decentralized

September 15, 2009
by Andy Oram
Editor, O'Reilly Media

Andy Oram

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks.

Whether you’re a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

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