Scripting News: Saturday Twitter thoughts

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Saturday Twitter thoughts

First, it seems we have the OPML Editor updating corner-turn done. Everyone who tried the new RSS-based code updating method reports that it works as advertised, so I can now start pushing new code down the modern highly-scalable pipe. That's pretty cooool.

The first bits I'm going to push is new script glue for the Twitter API, making it easy to write little apps in the OPML Editor (or Radio or Manila, for that matter) that use Twitter as a back end. I think some interesting pub-sub apps will be made possible by this.

So, as I was beginning to test the new code, I created a new test account on Twitter, one of many that I've created, for each of the channels of content that my little robots are maintaining. This one is called simply enough "opml." Then something occurred to me -- exactly the right people are signing up to Twitter these days to make it possible for another bootstrap to occur, one that many people seem to want, as do I -- we could make Twitter the open identity system we've been looking for. Make your Twitter ID the one that you use to log on to other services. It seems we're going to go through that bootstrap anyway, and it also seems that if the Twitter folk want to do something good for the Internet they could.

So I wonder if any of the identity gurus are watching this and see the opportunity?

Anyway, I'm going back to my coding for now.

system.verbs.apps.twitter is on the way! ";->"

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:36 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

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