I wrote a simple Hello World app for Twitter. You could help by trying it and saying if it worked. It should be obvious what to do.#

Yesterday I read the archives of this blog for August and September of 2002. I was taking notes on the process that led to RSS 2.0 on 9/18/02. At first the project was called RSS 0.94, but after a while, listening to other developers, I changed it to 2.0. It's a long messy story, and by calling it 2.0 we said enough of the messy story. All we want is a feed syndication format that works, and that's exactly what RSS 2.0 is. It works. We got support from all the major news organizations, we already had the support of the NY Times. In the process of designing RSS 2.0, the BBC opened its feeds. And on 9/18/02, the spec was published. From there a small revolution happened, leading to the social media world we enjoy today. #

As you might imagine, in this excursion, there were lots of broken links. As always archive.org was the answer. But for UserLand-hosted sites, very often archive.org has a message about their crawler hitting our servers too hard. An awful lot of our stuff is lost. But I'm sure most of it is in Frontier databases, so ultimately is findable. I'm going to try to do just that with the important bits of the August-September work on RSS. #

Jon Udell, then a columnist at InfoWorld, called the inclusion of namespaces in RSS 2.0 an "olive branch." All perspectives are valid of course, but imho it was not an olive branch or a gesture, it was something I had commited to early-on, shortly after Netscape disappeared. I had been saying all along that namespaces will be added to RSS when the spec is ready to be frozen, so growth can continue, after there is agreement on a common core of functionality. I felt that adding namespaces too early would encourage people to go their own ways, with different ways to do the same thing, which isn't good for interop. I wanted to encourage people to seek adoption from other developers. Otherwise what's the point of having a standard? Since RSS 2.0 was going to be frozen when it was published, that was the time to open the door for extensions. It's a way of saying "this is done" but it's not the end. 😄#