Sounds like what you are after is buddycloud (https://beta.buddycloud.org), lets list its win points:

- open-source - open-standards - free - federated

Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish.

Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers (admission: I am on of these developers).

When you join up you can find me at lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk

https://buddycloud.org and https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Buddycloud_HTTP_API to get started.

Or jump into the https://beta.buddycloud.org/team@topics.buddycloud.org to ask any questions about dev issues.

This looks really interesting. Is there a page on the site somewhere that gives a high-level overview of what it is and how it works? The wiki has lots of technical details, but nothing I could find that you could email to a decisionmaker and say "you should read this."

/me nods. I'll write something up this weekend. Thanks for the feedback!

What would its advantages be over status.net/identi.ca?

status.net is great, but I would have federation where you can add a server as a source rather than just a user. Then if that server has a @fred, @fred would always be resolved to the @fred on that server. In conflicts, you should be able to resolve these conflicts and proxy names yourself. (my proof of concept doesn't do this)

Maybe even taking Diaspora and taking out everything except 140char status updates AND adding an API compatible with Twitter apps would be a better approach.

edit: clarity to first sentence.

How do you control spam?

I don't, it's just a proof of concept.

In the distributed implementation I would have a chain of trust from the people you follow, where if you report someone as a spammer, the server that represents people who follow you could look at your list and filter spammers based off this. You could also set the depth to traverse. There is a lot you could do with this.

I'm not saying my implementation is right, but someone needs to do it. Tweeting is a type of communication and needs to be distributed.