Twitter is Proprietary RSS
So, it seems that Twitter has been down lately. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about what is to be done. A lot of people have come around on the Twitter phenomenon, and I think I know why:
Twitter is proprietary RSS
What does Twitter do? It allows me to blog and to subscribe to other bloggers. It provides an interface that combines reading and writing. The other stuff (micro-limits, SMS, API) are the candy on top. But at it’s core, Twitter is just a nicely packaged blogging tool and blog reader that provides programmatic “awareness” of who is subscribed to you (as opposed to just who you are subscribed to).
Here’s a thought experiment: What if I could mash my RSS reader (Google Reader) with my blogging tool (Mephisto)? What if Mephisto (and all compliant blogging tools) supported a simple API to accept a ping indicating that someone has subscribed to my feed? So, I subscribe to Bob’s feed, my reader send his blog a ping, and he now knows that he’s being “followed”. It’s this precisely what a distributed Twitter would be?
Comments
-
Uhmmm… let’s suppose I’m following ~800 people on Twitter (i.e. I’m subscribed to 800 “blogs”). To receive the updates, in a non-centralized Twitter-like solution, I see 2 scenarios: 1) the push: every time a “blog” is updated, it sends the update to my machine. This means that, a) I have to accept incoming connections, and b) a “blog” with thousands of subscribers must make thousands of connections for every update. 2) the pull: my client has to poll every “blog” every X minutes to check for updates. Instead of 1 connection to a single server, it must make 800 connections all over the net.
Either I’m missing the point, or the centralized solution is the one that makes most sense :-)
-
I’m not sure I follow you. Isn’t having millions of bloggers/consumers pulling less than a thousand feeds (on average) inherently more scalable than having a single company pulling/pushing tens or hundreds of millions of “messages” around their proprietary system? Isn’t that precisely why Twitter is having such a hard time scaling?
Second, your argument about pulling updates sounds exactly like arguments made against RSS readers way back in the day. Anyone who used a desktop RSS application is pulling hundreds of feeds, every so often. But no one considers this a broken system. I happen to use Google Reader (an on-line RSS reader) so I benefit from the caching that Reader does for all its users.
