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Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

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Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#21

Post by riffic »

chris_mahan wrote: post #6

Uh, DNS is too hard for most people. So is maintaining a web server. If you want any kind of reliability you're going to have to spend 10/year on domain name, 15/year on good DNS server, and 10/month on web hosting. That's $145/yr. Users can use twitter and facebook for free. Besides, the general public can't even use HTML well, so what chance do they have with xml? The other compelling thing about twitter is that 14…

The stuff that is hard for most people is moderately easy for those who actually have a message to transmit. I'm thinking of government agencies, or businesses.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#22

Post by aaron-lebo »

smacktoward wrote: post #20
aaron-lebo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was confused myself as to why he doesn't do this. He mentions not having titles being an issue in Google Reader, but the same issue is apparent if you try to add the rss feed of his linkblog in Firefox; you just get a bunch of links with no details. Do RSS titles have character limits?

No, neither RSS nor Atom specify a maximum number of characters for TITLE elements. Which isn't to say that particular readers/clients don't truncate them, of course, just that the specs don't say they should.

Interesting. So does anyone have any suggestions, technical or otherwise, other than "twitter posts don't have titles" that he does it this way?

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#23

Post by icebraining »

smallegan wrote: post #14

He mentions the lack of a notifications system. Isn't there room in this open system for a ping type notification service or group of services? The benefit for such a service to be free would be that they could aggregate the data and mine it as twitter does. Then clients could fail back to polling should this service not be available.

pubsubhubbub

A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.

Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated.

The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:

- An feed URL (a "topic") declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML file, via . The hub(s) can be run by the publisher of the feed, or can be a community hub that anybody can use. (Atom and RssFeeds are supported)

- A subscriber (a server that's interested in a topic), initially fetches the Atom URL as normal. If the Atom file declares its hubs, the subscriber can then avoid lame, repeated polling of the URL and can instead register with the feed's hub(s) and subscribe to updates.

- The subscriber subscribes to the Topic URL from the Topic URL's declared Hub(s).

- When the Publisher next updates the Topic URL, the publisher software pings the Hub(s) saying that there's an update.

- The hub efficiently fetches the published feed and multicasts the new/changed content out to all registered subscribers.

The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs.

To bootstrap this, we've provided an open source reference implementation of the hub (the hard part of the protocol) that runs on Google App Engine, and is open for anybody to use.

https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#24

Post by shampoo »

_pferreir_ wrote: post #11
Create wrote: post #5

https://identi.ca/doc/source

You read my mind. identi.ca is a really good idea, it's a pity that it hasn't managed to catch up with Twitter in terms of user base.

..and why is that ? Wouldn't what Dave Winer is speaking of have the same fate as identi.ca ?

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#25

Post by aaron-lebo »

icebraining wrote: post #23
smallegan wrote: post #14

He mentions the lack of a notifications system. Isn't there room in this open system for a ping type notification service or group of services? The benefit for such a service to be free would be that they could aggregate the data and mine it as twitter does. Then clients could fail back to polling should this service not be available.

pubsubhubbub A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated. The protocol in a nutshell is as follows: - An feed URL (a "topic") declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML fi…

I've run across pubsubhubhub before (geez that's hard to write), and it seems like a really useful implementation.

What I wasn't sure of is when he mentions polling is that instead of pshh or would that work with it?

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#26

Post by gbog »

This article is a bit confusing, I'm not sure it is stating its view in the simplest way. Trying to explain that view to someone else I'd do like this:

Twitter, Facebook and the like should be like emails: if you send me an email from hotmail I can read it on gmail or any other mall client. I should be able to subscribe to friends, interesting people or other social content provider and consume this comment from the client of my choice. Something that Google reader was not very far to provide.

Wrote something about this view sometime ago: http://www.douban.com/note/174513094/

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#27

Post by icebraining »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #25
icebraining wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pubsubhubbub A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated. The protocol in a nutshell is as follows: - An feed URL (a "topic") declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML fi…

I've run across pubsubhubhub before (geez that's hard to write), and it seems like a really useful implementation. What I wasn't sure of is when he mentions polling is that instead of pshh or would that work with it?

Polling always works, but if the feed and the client are PSHB-enabled, then they can use it.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#28

Post by riffic »

shampoo wrote: post #24
_pferreir_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read my mind. identi.ca is a really good idea, it's a pity that it hasn't managed to catch up with Twitter in terms of user base.

..and why is that ? Wouldn't what Dave Winer is speaking of have the same fate as identi.ca ?

in my mind, identi.ca is a red herring. What really matters is the platform, StatusNet. This is a software package that, kind of like Wordpress, can be installed on your host allowing you to run your own microblog service.

This package, and the underlying OStatus protocol, is where organizations that want to retain control over their own reliability and namespace should be looking.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#29

Post by cube13 »

riffic wrote: post #17

Over and over I emphasize that Twitter is not a public utility. If you're an organization that has to get your micromessage out there, you're better off hosting your own services.

I don't get what an "open" twitter system will have over the current one. Unless I'm missing something, this is just RSS feeds.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#30

Post by ammmir »

RSS? DNS? camelCased JSON?

I don't know if you're going to entice many developers with that combination. What we need is a simple protocol (not an API), maybe JSON/MessagePack based with UDP signaling, that makes it easy to build distributed Twitter-like services, while also reachable by HTTP. The developer experience needs to be easy enough so that a distributed "hello world" service can be built in less than 5 minutes. It needs to come with a cross-platform P2P server component, and client libraries for a few popular languages. Make the barrier to entry so low that any dev can do "apt-get install " to get the server/client bits.

The average user doesn't know DNS (username.twitter.com) as well as they do email addresses (username@twitter.com) and URIs (twitter.com/username). If this is going to gain adoption, it needs to prioritize UX familiarity over technical superiority. Everyone has an email address, so use that for identification, but don't clutter people's inboxes by using them to transport or store app data.

Make it super easy to federate with existing walled gardens by providing open-source implementations of server components so Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. can get up and running quickly.

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