// Open Source FTW

Great essay about San Fransisco. Considered moving to the West Coast before. This has helped change my mind.

One thing you said though:

some ideas that seem silly at the outset have world-changing, democratizing potential (I’d like to think Twitter is one such idea, of course).

How is Twitter democratizing?

It provides the masses with a way to communicate. It's helping in the Iranian revolution. But it's all controlled by one company. You don't "set up a Twitter server," or "choose a Twitter provider," or pay your monthly Twitter bill to the city government. You sign up for a Twitter account, which is provided to you by the company. If you don't like it, your only recourse is to leave everyone you know there behind.

Status.net provides a competing, Free/Open-Source service, and their software is run on multiple servers which can all talk to each other. But unless you're really attached to their unique features, they're useless because Status.net software users (like on Identi.ca, the largest install) can't freely communicate back and forth with people on Twitter. Status.net's most useful feature is that it lets you cross-post, one-way, to Twitter.

Is Twitter really democratizing, or is it more like inviting people to live under the rule of a -- currently -- good king? Just something to think about maybe.