Sean Reiser

Last week I attended Dave Winer's roadshow for bootstrapping the RSSCloud. It was an interesting meeting lots of discussion and I think that RSSCloud has some potential. It's always fun being in a room with seasoned pros, young turks and other folks some smarter then you and feeling the energy as these things are discussed.

It's funny to know that as the discussion lately has been around making the web real time (or more appropriately "real-ish time" as someone said in the meeting). RSS has been declared dead because it's not "real time". Solutions from XMPP to SubHubPubDubFlubClubMudBlood has been proposed. Dave is sitting in the corner basically saying I solved the realtime problem in 2002, see the Cloud element, let's use it! On the way back to the train after the meeting I was asked why

Dave's real interest is building a "loosely coupled 140 character messaging network", something that needs a shorter name. He's not looking to create a twitter killer, but to open open up some of twitter functionality. Also as it's entirely published in RSS links and media enclosures can be put into appropriate item elements instead of as links in the message: freeing up some space, and making it easy to embed such things in a client. Also, getting the link out of the message solves the link shortening problem.

During the meeting I pointed out that Twitter today is AOL in 1992. I posted a description of this in a post on Evo's Blog:

Back in the early 90’s there were a number of competing networks floating around AOL, CompuServe, MSN, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. Like twitter today the solutions were rather closed, and didn’t interoperate well with each other. An AOL user couldn’t send an email to someone on GEnie, participate in CIS’s CB or take part in a message area on Prodigy. Over the next couple of years companies moved their support to either newsgroups or web based forums, people abandoned CB for IRC on the internet and email in these services because gateways to traditional internet mail. This is (slowly) happening in the IM space now as jabber (and gtalk) has been interoperating with a number of different services.

There have been a few attempts to build a twitter killer, and they’ve failed, bigger is not the solution. I think that a small network of servers based on RSS Cloud will show up (probably an identica implementation) and interoperate. It will be initially small and rag tag much like the net in 92… mostly tech heads and we won’t be abandoning twitter while we play in that space. Once this starts happening there will be pressure on twitter to interoperate with this network but they will refuse as their business model depends on them owning the data and parsing it out.

Eventually a movie studio or celeb, maybe @AplusK, will say “wait, I can run my own server, own my network, run advertising and build my brand instead of twitter’s and I have enough pull that I can pull some my fans with me”. Much like email before it twitter will eventually break down the wall and federate with the outside network.

At the end of the day closed systems are proof of concept for the ‘net once they become popular we route around them they have to open or perish.

So, why is all this important? Anil Dash writes in this (excellent post)[http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/the-pushbutton-web-realtime-becomes-real.html]:

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

Of course this is bigger then twitter and facebook. Imagine being able to have real time financial data delivered to a spread sheet automatically and it re-rating the a financial portfolio. This can extend to order systems, inventory control, or anything else where getting and calculating from real time data is critical. No longer are you tied into proprietary solutions. The possibilities are endless.

So, what does all this mean for me? Well, I've always wanted to have a system that aggregates and stores and delivers my activity across the web. Where I've loved friendfeed for this (and FF is a great community), this is really trading one group holding my data for another. Now that I've aggregated the data in one place, I figure that it makes sense to cloud enable that feed which I'm currently working on. Over on Play With Keyboard I'll be setting it up the RPC calls and hacking the RSS feed in the next couple of days.

Stay tuned for more....