Quoted: A component is a trusted piece of an XMPP server that can send and receive arbitrary stanzas. Components speak a different protocol to communicate with the server. Because the name of a component is a domain (example: arbiter.chesspark.com), a component can pretend to be many users. Any stanza addressed to user@component.server.com will be delivered to component.server.com no matter what the value is of ‘user’.

Anyone can setup a micro-blogging platform - and federate with the others....identi.ca uses this.

XMPP based micro-blogging site - more open/scalable than Twitter.

xmpppy is a Python library that is targeted to provide easy scripting with Jabber. Similar projects are Twisted Words and jabber.py.

Google Talk API's

Twitter uses the model of a single monolithic service which attempts to become a central hub for all personal "event" messages. As we are seeing, this is a very challenging scaling problem.

There is some standardization work going on around "XMPP" - which started as an IM protocol (person-to-person), but has added extensions to support "publish-subscribe" (PubSub) and "Personal Eventing" (PEP).

I think a distributed system, more like email, may be a more sustainable way to deliver the Twitter-like services that people desire. There will still need to be centralized servers that support "tracking" - so people can subscribe to updates for groups or tags.

Unfortunately, Twitter-like functionality has N^2 scaling characteristics (since each Tweet generates a message that has to be transmitted to each follower). So any architecture designed to handle the load will have to efficiently manage the collection and then distribution of all of these messages.