The future is Usenet, all over again

With the rise of Twitter, and the subsequent introduction of Laconica to federate things, I think I'm beginning to see the rhyme of history. Eventually we'll want to replicate everything in Usenet, but just a bit different

• Anonymous posting will be prohibited
• Tags will replace the hierarchy of groups
• Digital Signatures will prevent forgery
• All posts will have URIs so we can still link to them.
• We still won't be able to markup hypertext. (a pet peeve)
• Data will be streamed instead of batch mode.
  

There were a lot of things to like about Usenet

• Push model saved bandwidth
• Aggregation was built in
• Group hierarchies helped increase signal to noise
• It was federated from the start
• Binary attachments were supported
  

So, we'll get some new hybrid which will help us adapt to the contemporary demands of the internet. I believe that a new push infrastructure is on its way. If done right, we could even get rid of Email and the spam problem, but that's story.