Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem • Hacker News Board

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#41

Post by _pius » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:24 PM UTC

alpine wrote: post #34

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 ne…

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.

Big statement. How do you get critical mass when practically every journalist, celebrity, and person you went to school with uses Twitter or Facebook and not your new open system?

While I definitely think an open solution could eventually "take over the space" and leave Twitter and Facebook as "AOL-like also rans," it's far from obvious to me how one would do it in a year.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#42

Post by smacktoward » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:28 PM UTC

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…

Dave also has a proposed notification standard of his own, called RSSCloud:

http://rsscloud.org/

There's been some drama between the developers of the two systems in the past:

* http://scripting.com/stories/2009/07/22/snappyRetardedAnswer...

* http://brad.livejournal.com/2405147.html

* https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/23404535816912896

(Drama being nothing new to the RSS world, alas. Sigh)

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#43

Post by shampoo » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:29 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #28

shampoo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..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.

I agree entirely. But identi.ca is the most popular implementation of status.net and it hasn't taken off. identi.ca, status.net, etc, need to offer something else that twitter.com, other then Freedom.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#44

Post by alpine » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

_pius wrote: post #41

alpine wrote: post #34

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 ne…

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. Big statement. How do you get critical mass when practically every journalist, celebrity, and person you went to school with uses Twitter or Facebook and not your new open system? While I definitel…

It is a big statement, isn't it? I do believe it to be true, however. What I'm positing is that the technological pieces can all be deployed relatively easily. What is required is the 'spark of genius' that triggers mass adoption. The hook into the new system has to be easy; it has to be cool; it has to smart; it has to be desirable. Possibly even irrational.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#45

Post by sthatipamala » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #21

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.

Have you seen the websites of most local businesses, like restaurants? They look like they are from 1995. Web dev not easy for them.

Many of the same businesses are using Twitter to get their message out far more effectively.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#46

Post by riffic » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:45 PM UTC

shampoo wrote: post #43

riffic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree entirely. But identi.ca is the most popular implementation of status.net and it hasn't taken off. identi.ca, status.net, etc, need to offer something else that twitter.com, other then Freedom.

I think that's a marketing problem, rather than technical.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#47

Post by riffic » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:46 PM UTC

sthatipamala wrote: post #45

riffic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you seen the websites of most local businesses, like restaurants? They look like they are from 1995. Web dev not easy for them. Many of the same businesses are using Twitter to get their message out far more effectively.

I know what you mean. Not all businesses are going to have the same technical competency. In fact if they lack the technical competency, perhaps Twitter is their best choice.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#48

Post by rwhitman » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 7:48 PM UTC

If someone can put this together in a package that consumers can wrap their head around, I think the open twitter movement would have a shot.

Probably the best candidates would be all the Twitter client apps that are getting burned by their API lockdown

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#49

Post by msutherl » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 8:12 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #46

shampoo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree entirely. But identi.ca is the most popular implementation of status.net and it hasn't taken off. identi.ca, status.net, etc, need to offer something else that twitter.com, other then Freedom.

I think that's a marketing problem, rather than technical.

It's a product problem, rather than technical.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#50

Post by look_lookatme » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 8:15 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #39

cube13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a message is posted in public and no one sees it, does it matter?

People won't be using this new decentralized service. They'll be using Twitter. I guess you can feed into Twitter, but the last mile is still Twitter.