Twitter Thoughts
August 13I was just thinking about the problem of status updates, and multiple sites that allow you to post them, and the fact that most of us use Twitter and it’s generally pretty flaky.
I realised that a potential solution would be to have a kind of status update protocol, that all of the status update sites can conform to (some can have their own extensions, of course, such as pictures/locations, etc). Then people can host their own status update systems, much the way they host blogs now, or you can use one of the many ready-hosted services. The fact that all of these systems conform to the same protocol means that if, say, I used Twitter for my updates, I could still add you as a friend even if you were using your own self-hosted update system, and see your updates within my Twitter dashboard (and vice-versa).
Thoughts? Ideas? Anyone know if anything like this is happening already? Is there a big hole in my idea?
August 13th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I’m pretty sure that creating a protocol from scratch for this kind of thing would be reinventing the wheel, you could probably base it on XMPP or something like that. Standard XMPP basically gives you the direct messaging and status updates already (though XMPP clients don’t usually put emphasis on the status - just “Away”, “Extended away”, “Available”, etc.) so you’d just need to add a web API. Of course, the problem with this idea is that when lesser-experienced developers (including me) hear ‘XMPP’ they scream and leave a human-shaped hole in the nearest brick wall
August 14th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Andy is right, no need to reinvent the wheel, you can do it with XMPP already see - http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html