Although I’m fairly ill-equipped to delve deep into burgeoning distributed social networking “standards”, there are some clear trends in play pointing toward the need for microblogging to become a platform independent activity. (The multiple Twitter outages over the last week are only the icing on this cake.)

Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / underground publishing culture, it wasn’t until the first blog CMSs landed in 1999 and 2000 (like Blogger and Movable Type) that mainstream audiences experimented with self-publishing. Those blogging at the time might remember what a highly platform-based experience it was. RSS and other forms of one:any (not just one:many) aggregation hadn’t yet come into widespread use, meaning some of those early platforms fed right back into their own siloed communities. This was especially apparent in the case of LiveJournal, which was really popular back then. Way late to RSS, LiveJournal instead relied on a light social networking system that aggregated posts to groups of friends using the service. Sounds familiar. Of course, blogging eventually grew up and out of its early stages into something far more horizontal and platform independent, ensuring the activity of blogging didn’t tie users to just one system and set of relationships.

Although Twitter should be clearly wary of users eventually fleeing for a distributed, decentralized, relationship-based cloud of microblogging, I think most in the know would agree that ultimately it’s what the medium needs to make the next step. Because of Twitter’s dependence on relationships, though, that transition probably won’t come easily; perhaps that’s where services like FriendFeed and other meta-aggregators step in as the glue for disparate, distributed life-content apps. Or perhaps that’s the tack Twitter needs to build into its own business, ensuring it makes the transition from early platform to future technology leader.