I love this from Dave:
The why of it: I want to create, out of RSS, something like Twitter, but not locked up on one company’s servers. Call me an opensorcerer or a rastafarian, but I like networks that aren’t controlled by one company. Esp not a tech company.
Doing what needs to be done. Yesss.
We need a streaming RSS, or SRSS, first. So if you ask for your RSS feed but append &streaming=yes then instead of closing out the outermost XML, your feed goes idle. Then, as more feed entries become available, they get written to your feed, and you immediately receive them. For really really popular feeds, like Britney’s, you’d need a modified TCP stack which understood that it was writing the same data to many sessions, and would only need to keep one copy in memory, but with many many pointers into it.
We need something that lets us set up persistent tubes which we can push stuff into from either end, unlike an RSS feed, a tube would sync both ways…
Unfortunately, all I have at this time to offer is a vague sense of what I’m trying to do, posted at http://intertubes.org
It’s a laudable goal; I just wish he’d pay more attention to status.net and the ostatus network, since they’re in the process of solving the same problem, using existing open standards.
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