RSS + XMPP = Decentralized Twitter
So the interest is rising on what to do about all this Twitter lock-in and their inevitable failure at keeping up with the infrastructure demands of scaling.
Michael Arrington has a surpringly nascent post on what he sees as a solution. Though Michael is surprised at my cognitive state, I was happy to see a typo in his post. This means Michael is still a human (despite his godfatherly posture) . My bet is that by the time you get to read his post “complaint” - will get fixed to “compliant”.
Meanwhile - back at the scaling conversation, Arrington lays out how microblogging tools can simply use XMPP to route messages to Twitter and each other via XMPP, while not relying upon the existing way its done now. Clients like ‘Alert Thingy’ can easily add this - so now we will see what happens.
Genius’ at work - like Dave Winer and Bill LeFebvre - will figure it out.
If we could create a giant list of ‘microbloggers’ - somehow federated together - that would be a good thing - too. Maybe this is where the ’shared social graph’ comes in? How ’bout using OpenID?
I have nothing more to add to this - YES - please do it.
Now - back to my regularly scheduled work day.
UPDATE: Typo fixed!
May 5th, 2008 at 7:56 am
I’m not convinced on the push to decentralize Twitter. Why would we decentralize Twitter when don’t decentralize anything else? Twitter’s high volume of tiny messages make it the perfect candidate for *centralization*, not decentralization. I love your open mesh thinking, but there’s a serious need for more lucidity on when to centralize and when to decentralize. I agree that almost all companies blindly follow the centralized path these days, but Twitter is a very odd place to start.
The only correlation I see between Twitter and the push to decentralize it is the fact they’ve been unable to keep up with traffic. The problem is not that Twitter’s too centralized, though. It’s more likely somewhere between the many keyboards and chairs over at Twitter headquarters.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:45 am
You can install the WordPress ATOM-over-XMPP Pubsub plugin.
Or the XMPP PEP aggregator.
We still need clients, but this is happening soon.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:23 am
dude, you may know coding but you need to return for a refresher course in english. a “surprisingly nascent post…?” as they say in france, WTF?. pick up webster’s and acquaint yourself with the word’s meaning.
sigh
May 5th, 2008 at 11:22 am
You guys are nuts.
Dave Winer is fretting over “saving” what amounts to nothing more than vapid toss offs. Lord what we do if all of your precious 140 character twitters are lost? Horrors! Modern culture as we know it would cease.
You’re saying Twitter “blew it” when from what I can see, you’re all obsessed with the company. If anything, the value of the company probably increases each time you all bitch.
Arrington is talking about how “easy” this would be, when he’s never touched a line of code in his life. Frankly, I’m waiting for his hand coded beta. Let’s see Arrington slap down some code.
And outside of Silicon Valley, who gives a rat’s ass?
(No rule of grammar was harmed in the making of this comment)
May 5th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
We dont’ decentralize anything else?
Uhh, email, DNS, Blogging . . .
And XMPP has already well proven that IM can be decentralized. GTalk + millions of indy Jabber users.
I believe this WILL happen. But it might take time in the way that IM walled gardens are still melting down.
It’s good that we are talking about this earlier rather than later.
Keep an eye on openmicroblog.org. I’ll be working there.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
A better solution is atom (gdata) over XMPP with the content in the bightable cloud and using a RESTful interface.
May 5th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Not sure what the bightable cloud is, but definitely agree that RESTful AtomPub over XMPP is a much better solution than RSS: Here’s how AtomPub works in WordPress:
http://codex.wordpress.org/AtomPub
RSS != Feeds
May 5th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
My final statement above should be corrected:
Feeds != (just) RSS
May 6th, 2008 at 10:53 am
[…] When my gut tells me there’s something wrong with Twitter - I complain about it early and often. […]
May 9th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Prototype for distributed / decentralised microblogging using semantics…
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote an interesting blog post on Monday about a “decentralised Twitter”, which was picked up by Dave Winer, Marc Canter and Chris Saad amongst others.
I’m happy to say that we have recently described a…
May 9th, 2008 at 7:25 am
We’ve recently written a paper showing (one prototype called SMOB of) how distributed / decentralised microblogging can work:
“Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach”
http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2008/papers/11.pdf
The SMOB prototype code (both the semantic microblogging publishing client and server-based web service) is available at:
http://smob.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
See some pictures and more information on my blog post at:
http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/05/09/prototype-for-distributed-decentralised-microblogging-using-semantics/
May 12th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[…] there have been a lot of buzz recently regarding ways to provide open alternatives to Twitter, then fun thing is that we worked […]
May 13th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[…] This balancing act must also be taken into context with the other goings on of the open mesh, namely the Live Web, and whether or not its important to decentralize Twitter. […]