Twitter is Proprietary RSS

So, it seems that Twitter has been down lately. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about what is to be done. A lot of people have come around on the Twitter phenomenon, and I think I know why:

Twitter is proprietary RSS

What does Twitter do? It allows me to blog and to subscribe to other bloggers. It provides an interface that combines reading and writing. The other stuff (micro-limits, SMS, API) are the candy on top. But at it’s core, Twitter is just a nicely packaged blogging tool and blog reader that provides programmatic “awareness” of who is subscribed to you (as opposed to just who you are subscribed to).

Here’s a thought experiment: What if I could mash my RSS reader (Google Reader) with my blogging tool (Mephisto)? What if Mephisto (and all compliant blogging tools) supported a simple API to accept a ping indicating that someone has subscribed to my feed? So, I subscribe to Bob’s feed, my reader send his blog a ping, and he now knows that he’s being “followed”. It’s this precisely what a distributed Twitter would be?