Does anyone else think that all this head scratching over what is the most trivial of problems is hilarious? Twitter is just another naming service. Instead of addressing someone as foo@foo.com, they're now just @foo. All that's needed to make twitter distributed is a new protocol for name resolution. It could be as simple as GET http://distribtwitter.com/whois?foo returning <name>http://www.foo.com/mytwitterfeed</name>. You could write it in a day as a wordpress plugin.

Then other people could come along and write recursive caching distribtwitter name servers so that they can still twitter at people they've never twittered before when distribtwitter.com is down.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that web 2.0 rots the mind and turns trivial problems in to seemingly impossible problems.