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Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

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Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#31

Post by rhizome »

bntly wrote: post #3
michaelpinto wrote: post #2

I wish more people would embrace what Dave Winer is saying here and run with the ball. The current web as we know it has benefited from an open ecosystem: everything from the servers running Apache to web pages serving up HTML. I see a real long term danger in closed walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter, they're just not healthy.

But there are celebrities and that hot girl from high-school within that walled garden.It sucks and i wish the products were better and more open but the bar for entry is mostly user draw, and T&A is what draws them in.. *edited for spelling >_>

It's OK, for the time being, APIs allow you to pump content into the walled gardens from the new open Twootbook. Users can be bled off over time.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#32

Post by dasht »

"3. To identify users -- please use DNS."

Using DNS to identify users is unwise, in my opinion, because it means that people won't own their own on-line identities -- they'll have to rent them and for real money, too. And if some users are assigned a sub-domain on a shared domain, their identity won't be portable.

I think it is worth doing a little extra work to make a user name system that doesn't have those problems.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#33

Post by dasht »

"4. A user is a feed. So the name points to a feed."

What if the user wants to have more than one feed? Or wants, sometime down the road, to have routable resources that are not feeds?

Wouldn't it be better to say that a user name is a user name and that a default feed name can be automatically built given just the user name?

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#34

Post by alpine »

It's fairly obvious to me that an open system, that incorporates Twitter-like functionality as a subset of a greater whole, could take over this space in less than 12 months, leaving Twitter/Facebook/* as AOL-like also rans. Winer appears to have functional solutions for many of the parts needed to deploy this ecosystem. What is missing is a spark of genius to fire people's imagination, such that they flock to the new tool(s) with an eagerness not seen since early days of the www when Mosaic hinted at what could be done. I can't believe that all that is missing is a healthy dose of Mad Men marketing. Maybe that is the missing ingredient?

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#35

Post by riffic »

cube13 wrote: post #29
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.

What goals are you trying to accomplish using the service, be it Twitter.com or an open alternative?

Are you just trying to post/read feeds as an individual? If that is the case the open alternative does not provide you a benefit, and you will probably find it less convenient.

On the other hand, what if you have many users under one org? How about you're just a member of a division of another org, and they have many division and subdivisions. And they really want be sure that your message gets out there, without relying on a third party. The public relies on those messages, for example a fire department posting about wildfires. Those are the use cases that will probably see benefits.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#37

Post by cube13 »

riffic wrote: post #35
cube13 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What goals are you trying to accomplish using the service, be it Twitter.com or an open alternative? Are you just trying to post/read feeds as an individual? If that is the case the open alternative does not provide you a benefit, and you will probably find it less convenient. On the other hand, what if you have many users under one org? How about you're just a member of a division of another org, and they have many…

But in the second case, what's the difference between that and email?

If you have the infrastructure to handle a setup like that, you should already have an internal email server.

EDIT: After your edit, I think I've found where the disconnect is from my perspective. The problem with this method is that discovery(arguably the most important part of what Twitter provides) is still reliant on a third party's index.

From a user's perspective, Twitter provides 3 key services from one URL:

1. A unified feed for everyone you follow(This proposal also does this).

2. An easy way to post/host content(This proposal does not deal with this).

3. An easy way to discover new people to follow(This proposal also does not deal with this).

Out of those three, I would argue that the second and third are the most important. The problem isn't getting the message out to people that are already subscribed with Twitter, email, or a hosted website. The problem is discovery, and giving people an easy way to actually find the information that they're looking for.

The only way to handle discovery on this way is to have some hosted, third party method of searching through the users to find the ones you want to follow.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#38

Post by Feoh »

ammmir wrote: post #30

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 minu…

This has always been Dave's problem. He's a Big Idea Guy, but his implementations often end up being somewhat less than fully thought through. I say this as someone who has been following him for way more years than I like to think about (I wrote a bunch of Frontier code WAAAY back in the Classic MacOS days :) As always though, he's thought provoking and gets other people discussing better ways to do it, which I think he entirely approves of.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#39

Post by riffic »

cube13 wrote: post #37
riffic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What goals are you trying to accomplish using the service, be it Twitter.com or an open alternative? Are you just trying to post/read feeds as an individual? If that is the case the open alternative does not provide you a benefit, and you will probably find it less convenient. On the other hand, what if you have many users under one org? How about you're just a member of a division of another org, and they have many…

But in the second case, what's the difference between that and email? If you have the infrastructure to handle a setup like that, you should already have an internal email server. EDIT: After your edit, I think I've found where the disconnect is from my perspective. The problem with this method is that discovery(arguably the most important part of what Twitter provides) is still reliant on a third party's index. From…

The difference is, email isn't (usually) public. A status message is there, for anyone to see it, like a tweet.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#40

Post by smacktoward »

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?

Re the "hard to write" thing, PubSubHubbub's developers sometimes referred to it as "PuSH" for short. Which is easier.
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