Opportunity knocks, Try #3

By Dave Winer on 1/5/07; 1:18:35 PM.

Okay, the second Opportunity Knocks post was spectacularly unsuccessful. There must not be any underemployed PHP programmers in the Bay Area in my sphere of connectivity, or none who are interested in making a few bucks pioneering the attention economy with the principles of vendor relationship management.  

So be it. But I'm one stubborn mofo. I'll keep making offers until something hits a nerve. I really want to do this project.  

I no longer want a PHP programmer, and I'm willing to relax the rule about being in the Bay Area. I'm also willing to work with a developer community instead of hiring a contractor.  

So here's my idea... 

I want to define a cloud in Amazon S3 space, a cloud of subscription information, some of it public and some of it only accessible to the user. We're going to depend on Amazon's ability to keep stuff private that we want private, and make available publicly the stuff we want to publish.  

I'm looking for a family of apps, some that run on the desktop, some that run on servers, that allow a user to: 

1. Upload an OPML file with subscriptions to S3, in such a way that only the user can see the list of subs. 

2. Present that list to the user, with a checkbox next to each subscription. By default each box is checked. The box indicates whether or not the subscription will be visible to the public. The user can change the status of any of the subscriptions to shield it from public view. This is remembered, so whenever the OPML is published an unchecked item will not appear in the public list. (This is necessary because the existence of a feed in a subscription list may reveal private information about the person, where they live, who they bank with, etc.) 

3. A way to create a publicly visible OPML file, following the guidelines in the 2.0 draft spec, to be shared publicly, so that aggregators may create recommendation systems based on the information. It should be possible to create lots of interesting views of the informaiton. 

4. Every time the OPML file is updated, send a ping to a changes server that will either be operated openly by the community, or if no agreement can be reached in time, I will operate it myself. This avoids "who does he think he is" arguments. If it's possible to put something together that is free and open, and reasonably well managed without being owned, I'll support it. Otherwise I'll run the service myself, with the possibility that I may someday profit from it.  

I will also implement a desktop app in the OPML Editor. It'll be GPL, as is all the code I ship in the OPML Editor (and the editor itself). That's the plan.