With Twitter blasting over capacity today — which doesn't seem to be a very uncommon occurrence — I find myself pining for true peer-to-peer Twittering. And as I turn to Google Buzz out of almost desperation, a thought comes to mind:

Did Google get it backwards?

Part of the hubbub about Google Wave was that it was to be a protocol, a new open standard for which anyone could develop applications. Like email. To replace email.

Well, so far Google Wave hasn't caught much traction in the regular world. Oh yes, there is a small circle of people using it, developing for it. But I think Anil Dash may have been right:

So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.

[Edit: If you haven't read Anil's post, it really is quite fascinating. And fairly convincing.]

On the other hand, Google Buzz has launched as a service — really just an extension of Gmail.

** YAWN **

Too bad Google didn't see the potential of establishing a peer-to-peer twittering protocol with Buzz. That would have been the killer app.

And you know what? If they had done that, today's Twitter outages would be only more occasions for people to flee to a true P2P social media experience, without that singular point of failure that has the face of a whale.

(And the flip side: Imagine what Wave would be like now if Google were developing just a service, and not bothering with trying to make it a protocol. I'd like to think it would be at least a touch more usable by now.)