Scott Hanselman asks the question that should be on all our minds, as we come to depend more and more on Twitter. We need to do something about our over-reliance on a centralized system run by a for-profit company.

Read his whole post and think about what you can do.

One thing right off the bat -- if you make a desktop tool for Twitter, you can offer the user the option to store their twitstream as an RSS feed. Just do it in parallel, transparently for the user (although it's a preference). You can key off their Twitter ID. If you want I'll set up a service for free hosting of the feed on Amazon S3 (it's not a very expensive thing) or it's something you could provide as a bonus feature.

It's a step in a positive direction for decentralizing. It's not the whole thing, but it's a big part of it. And should Twitter ever go off the air for more than a few days, it'll be the way we put the network back together.