More movement in TwitterLand
Saturday, August 16, 2008 by Dave Winer.
And so far it looks like the Twitter folk did a good job with the features to support threading. 
This is a very lightweight feature on the server side, lots more work in the client, and very similar to the effort required to support payloads. Just three new fields in the struct that represents a status. A pointer to the payload, its MIME type and size so clients know what to display to represent the payload.
I love that identi.ca is matching Twitter feature-for-feature in the API, where it counts; continuing what Steve Gillmor calls their bearhug. Good term.
I also love that Twitter's API seems more responsive since the last time I worked on code that ran against it. Seems all the outages had a payoff, faster service for API calls.
I'm in a good mood, that's for sure, and then I heard that Obamaman raised $51 million in July. I love how they waited to announce theirs until after McSame announced he raised a mere $27 million. Heh. I love it when Dems play nasty. It's about fcuking time. 
BTW, back to tech politics, Steve Gillmor is absolutely correct to insist that identi.ca stick to the 140 character limit. If they didn't, users would have to remember to only type 140-character posts if they wanted them to be able to go over a bridge to Twitter. Imagine if all the rail in the US were the same gauge, how much easier things would have been (they're not even a consistent gauge in the NYC subway system). Engineers have a hard time accepting historic limits like this, but it's often a good idea (not always of course).
On a related topic DeWitt Clinton talks about the way FriendFeed handles general RSS sources.
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"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.
Dave Winer, 53, 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 Berkeley, California.
Dave Winer 
My most recent trivia on Twitter.
