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OPML for Twitter, Day 2
Wednesday, August 05, 2009 by Dave Winer.
Great reception for yesterday's rollout of OPML for Twitter Subscription Lists. 
Some thoughts from various people.
Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun asks if it makes sense to output not just the people you follow but the people who follow you. At first I was going to say no -- but then I remembered a very important thread that came up at the NYC meetup. What about when Ashton Kutcher wants to move his base from twitter.com to kutcher.com. He's going to need a way to export his follower list. So yes, it matters. Now I'm not sure I want to deal with an OPML file with over 3 million entries. So we need to think about this before writing the code. 
Shea Bennett at Twittercism, a very smart guy when it comes to Twitter, has a twist on Kevin's idea. He says OPML can be used to move subscribers between Twitter accounts. Hadn't thought of it, but yes -- it certainly can.
Phil Torrone says MAKE is the only OPML magazine. He's into what I call reading lists. Same idea Jay Rosen came up with for his Twitter followers. I think this time around it's going to happen. I make a list of great people you should follow, and maintain it. When I add one to the list, you automatically follow. When I remove one, you automatically unfollow. My guess is the Twitter folks already have something here too.
As I said in NY, I'm wanting to build something alongside Twitter, not instead of Twitter. I don't believe in killing in tech, I believe in respectful and peaceful co-existence. It's what really happens. Not the drama the reporters want, but the continuity users want.
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Dave Winer, 54, 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.
"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
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.Last update: 8/5/2009; 4:59:01 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
