FriendsOfDave in XML

Monday, January 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

First, a common request -- people have asked for an OPML subscription list for the FriendsOfDave Twitter/Identi.ca/FriendFeed feed. Done.  

http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsOfDave.opml  

But while I was doing this I had a thought that it's a micro-nano version of weblogs.com before it became a ping-server. If you recall, it used to poll for changes among a small set of weblogs. This method became unworkable because there were eventually too many blogs to poll. But FriendsOfDave is, by design, always going to be a small number of blogs. So I thought what the heck, let's have it generate a changes.xml file of its own.  

http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsOfDaveChanges.xml  

An old friend!  

Now, why this is interesting? It's a key feature of the "real time web" that so many of us are thinking about. If every feed had someone watching out for them, along with 100 or so other blogs, then if a subscriber wanted to know if you changed, it would just have to watch the changes file. Of course if only one person they followed was represented in that file, no economy would be achieved, but if you group similar sites, ones that are likely to be followed by the same people, then you do get the economy. 

Somehow the feed has to tell followers where their collection point is. Way back in time we used a category element at the top level of the feed to create this linkage. As far as I know no one build features on this, but they could have.  

Will anything become of it this time around? Probably not, but it's still kind of interesting, if only for the nostalgic value.