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Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

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Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#55
Here's a link to his linkblog.

http://static.scripting.com/myReallySimple/linkblog.html

It's great, except it's completely unusable due to it being a huge download of a page full of disparate links with no organization other than by date.

The trick is not in writing something like this, it's in making the information aggregated and easily organized.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#56
We need to treat our data like we treat our email. Define the common attributes comprising data within a particular application and define how to access that data (through an API). Come up with a common vocabulary for all data (crowd-sourced based on the current stewards of that type of application) and tie those calls into user identity providers (again, built around the common attributes of a user identity). Every interaction between apps and users goes through the user to collect permissions. Permissions are based on signals gained from all other interactions that have passed through the user identity provider. Signals like how often you interact with the app or user requesting the data, which topics you've interacted on previously, etc.. Data is still stored on separate app providers, but we now have simple access. The app provider uses the signals to build permissions specific to their application. Users can transfer their data from one provider to the next easily since all of the data definitions have been translated (assuming the apps are similar in nature).

More here: http://GoPalmetto.com/

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#57

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 use this with my atom feed, and updates show up within seconds on Google Reader. Therefore I don't know why he says an open system can't be as fast as Twitter. Unless the technology he's committed too, RSScloud, doesn't work as well.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#58
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 >_>

You just made me think of something. The common folk may as well continue using Twitter, and you're right about the bar to entry. We few, the vanguard of openness and reliability, can use approaches like Dave Winer's to provide an open, durable parallel "Twitter-like ecosystem" that integrates with Twitter—and once Twitter goes away (and Facebook and Google+ and even SMS) we will integrate with its successor—or hopef…

I can at least provide my own guarantees that it will be around (so long as some few others use it)

Isn't this exactly the problem? Keeping a service alive in perpetuity is missing the point because it's the communication that's important, not the service upon which the communication flows... Human communication is inherently temporally limited. If you ignore that, you're not gonna be heard now, which makes you even less likely to be heard in the future.

EDIT: I guess I'm just saying: nobody reads old messages on this sort of service. If you're not targeting "now", you're starting off with an immense disability.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#59
post #32

"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 problem…

Inventing a new identity system that features 1, portability and 2, end-user price of $0 is surely possible, but surely more than "a little extra work."

DNS has the virtue of being here now, being tested and refined over multiple decades, and offering a choice between subdomains for free or portability for a nominal annual cost. It's not perfect but it's good.

Re: Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem

#60
post #33

"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?

This makes the "Twitter-like" system less "Twitter-like". Don't get me wrong, I see your point, and I can think of a technical solution (point to OPML feed collections instead of feeds), but the further this gets from the original popular thing (Twitter) the less support and momentum it's going to have, imho. On Twitter it's one stream per user, and that keeps things simple. And simplicity is a huge part of the value add of twitter.
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