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What a 140-char message looks like in RSS

Sunday, July 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Here's a screen shot to contemplate. 

There are two 140-character messages. Each illustrates features of the new shipwreck I hope to sink, to create a new coral reef for Twitter-like systems to grow on and around. 

The first three items in each message are fairly obvious:  

<description> holds the 140-character text. 

<pubDate> is the timestamp, when the message was created. 

<guid> is the identifier for the message, so a reader can tell if they've seen it before.  

This makes it possible for the messages to be edited after publication, a common feature requests from writers using Twitter. 

After that come optional elements. 

<category> works like tags in apps like Flickr or YouTube. You specify them in a dialog, blanks separate them, you can create tags with blanks by putting them inside quotes.  

<link> is used to point to web pages. No need to shorten the URLs because they don't take up space in the 140 characters. 

<enclosure> is how you attach media objects to messages. Again, no need to shorten the URLs. And since the clients know the media type, they can show a preview, or embed a player. 

These all use well-understood elements of RSS 2.0. Nothing new needed to be invented.