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OpenTweet - distributed twitter-like service?May 3 2008

Scott Hanselman in this tweet (and on his blog) proposed a sort of a distributed tweet server to serve as an alternative to Twitter. He points out that this has been proposed before, and even implemented to some degree.

On the surface, Twitter is a feed of messages — combined with many ways of getting messages to the service, as well as many ways of getting messages from the service, plus a framework for subscribing to others’ feed and seeing others’ friends’ feeds.

A single user can certainly host their own feed, and (via some soon-to-be-established) microformat link to this feed. Assuming that we discount the issue of maintaining your own feed, how will people find your feed? How will they subscribe to it in a way that incorporates the rest of their friends’ feeds? How will replies and direct messages (both excellent features of twitter) be implemented in such a model? Let’s dissect these in more detail.

Finding a feed

The low-tech, least-usable way of doing this is, of course, to just tell the reader to find the publisher’s site, find the tweetfeed link, and add it to their rea

Windows / RSSAugust 7 2006

Microsoft’s new version of IE will have RSS feed management based on the new Microsoft Feeds API. This API is also going to be used by the upcoming Office 2007, notably in Outlook.

This is actually a great development. I’ve been a big fan of using mail reader based feedreaders, and totally love the fact that now I don’t have to use third party software. What I’m not happy about is feed synchronization.

I fairly regularly use three computers: a desktop at work, a desktop at home, and a laptop that I bring back and forth. I run Outlook 2007 (beta, of course) on my laptop. However, I sometimes want access to my feeds on one of the other machines, whether because I quickly want to check one of the blogs, or because I find a site that I want to add to my Outlook reading list. But, being on another machine, I’m out of luck.

Outlook makers thought of this, somewhat. Since feeds get delivered into Exchange folders, I can actually just read the posts being retrieved by my laptop from wherever I can run Outlook. But what if I don’t want to run Outlook everywhere?

The solution has got to be feed synchronization. A simple service can receive OPML files containing your blogroll and then synchronize them across Windo

Those darn wikisJune 21 2005

The other day, LA Times launched a concept they called wikitorial — basically, they started a wiki, put a professionally written editorial on it, and link to this wiki from the newspaper’s site’s home page. Then, as far as anyone can see, about a day later they shut the site and blamed vandals for the closure. The blogosphere has been laughing, in a way, at the LA Times folks who couldn’t handle the heat. I think that they’re wrong to laugh.

Shortly after the wikitorial was put up, I found myself on the LA Times wiki — they called it LATWiki. This to me looked like a crippled version of the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia and Wikinews. Crippled, because some things I expect in the software, like the Recent Changes list, or any sort of community pages for coordination of editing efforts, were very clearly absent. No village pump, no water cooler.

After just manually going to the recent changes page, two things became obvious: 1) there was some vandalism going on, and 2) Jimbo Wales was online, fixing things. Between the two of us, we then moved some pages around, introduced some navigation, created a bit of space for collaboration, left instructions for newbies, and kept an eye on van