On a distributed microblogging network | Hacker News Reader

On a distributed microblogging network

taylorheffernan.squarespace.com

15 pointsams115 comments

This is beginning to sound like a gradual reinvention of Usenet.

"Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it... poorly."

Let's do this...without the micro part!

identi.ca / laconica

Possibly the openmicroblogging protocol behind laconia or pubsubhubbub. Hopefully we can move away from platforms and instead have easy interoperability for a variety of apps.

Open a wordpress blog. (or any other blog service)

Write short posts (less than 500 chars)

Use your reader of choice (Google Reader is the best)

There you have it, a microblogging network.

PS. use Atom feeds for a better experience.

I can't help but feel that this idea misses the point of why Twitter was so successful - far more than the notion of convincing all those millions of users to start their own blogs and use Google Reader. The sheer simplicity of it all lowers the barriers to entry, something that asking people to start a wordpress blog or whatever else would never capture.

That really isn't what I was trying to convey. The idea was that Twitter needs to be decentralized and we need services to do that. Like any open alternative to something popular and closed, it will take time to get going, but this can be just as user friendly as Twitter - there is just the option for people to host it themselves, essentially

If I was Matt Mullenweg I would be having a meeting right now to implement Wordpress Lite ASAP.

That, my friends, is the twitter killer. With all the themes, plugins, widgets and all the ecosystem.

At the same time, Google should be updating their Reader with an Instant Update feature for selected feeds.

I know Wave will have some of this, but why wait?

The P2 theme is Wordpress's best answer to Twitter. It's pretty cool: http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/

Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal founder) is at Google working on PubSubHubbub, which is a distributed push system for RSS. The Google Reader team is already experimenting with it (as a provider currently, not a consumer): http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/08/pubsubhubbub-suppor...

There's also already a WP PubSubHubBub plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pubsubhubbub/

P2 is the answer. I know beauty when I see it.

Now, implement collapse/expand comments and new comment notifiers (red bubble/white number) and you have a twitter, friendfeed and facebook killer.

I think Matt Mullenweg is in the meeting where they're discussing remote Wordpress admin exploits right now.

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