A new web service for Twitter clients

Sunday, May 04, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Yesterday I wrote about a way to prepare to decentralize Twitter, in the event of a lengthy outage. The goal is to create no extra work or complexity for users. I think this is the responsible way for developers to help because it's 1. Not a good idea to build a centralized system around a for-profit company and 2. Users generally won't do anything extra to decentralize to prepare for an outage, but when one happens, they blame us (technologists) for not protecting them. Right or wrong, this is the way it is. So I'm working on a step-by-step bootstrap that, if enough developers go along, will have us reasonably protected against a prolonged Twitter outage. It's not to say that it's the only way to do it, but it seems to me that it's one way. 

I said I might put up a web service to store user's RSS feeds on Amazon S3, and I'd pick up the hosting bill, to help the bootstrap. One developer took me up on the proposal, so I went ahead and implemented it. Here's how it works. 

1. There's a new XML-RPC service at this address: xmlrpc://rpc.twittergram.com/RPC2 

2. The name of the procedure is twittergram.saveFeed. 

3. It takes three params: The user's Twitter username and password, and the text of the feed. The password is only used to authenticate, it is not stored on the server.  

4. It returns the URL of the feed as its stored on feeds.twittergram.com.  

5. Code (in UserTalk) that works.

local (server = "xmlrpc://rpc.twittergram.com/RPC2")
local (username = "davewiner", password = user.twitter.prefs.password)
local (feedtext = tcp.httpreadurl ("http://twitter.scripting.com/daveRss.xml"))
local (url = [server].twittergram.saveFeed (username, password, feedtext))
webbrowser.openurl (url)

6. You can call the routine at most once a minute. This may be increased if it becomes a popular service. My server is limited to 70 calls per hour. Again something will have to be done if it becomes popular.