Anil Dash has an opinion piece today on CNN which basically says don't let a service like Twitter or Facebook be the only game in town. And he has a point.
The Internet was designed such that during an emergency situation even if a a single or multiple nodes of the network were cut off, communication would still flow.
Anil points out, correctly, that some of today's current services such as Twitter present a single point of failure as it is a stand alone service. For example, Twitter was down for 90 minutes this past Wednesday so the flow of communication with respect to the effort in Haiti was halted, at least on Twitter.
"... it was big news when Twitter was offline for 90 minutes Wednesday morning. Technology pundits promptly began hand-wringing -- the weaknesses of having a single point of failure to critical communications had been revealed again! Could we trust Twitter? Did this mean the Web couldn't help us fulfill our most basic obligations to those in need?"
Twitter is by no means the only tool or service available to people wanting to exchange information on Haiti or any other event during an emergency. But the fact remains that because of it's simplicity it has become hugely popular and has become one of the main viral tools of choice to propagate real-time news.
What do to then? Down times at Twitter are not new. Their core of engineers work hard to scale the service and deal with it's growth and spikes. But it's still currently a single point of failure. What if Twitter was down for several days during a major emergency?
Well the good news is that the flow of information would still flow, just through other different services on the Internet. But what would people turn to for their real-time 140 character messages? Twitter has competitors but they have not reached the critical mass Twitter has. What about Facebook? They certainly have a bigger audience. But although Facebook is morphing into something akin to Twitter it still doesn't have the interface nor the simplicity of Twitter.
Perhaps it's time for a new Internet protocol built on top of the internet like the http protocol which is used for the web? This could be a new project of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This way companies like Twitter who provide near real-time news could use the protocol as could any other company and the information would flow regardless if any one service like Twitter went down.