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rssCloud news

Thursday, August 06, 2009 by Dave Winer.

The cloud keeps right on rollin along!  

I love this piece by Rex Hammock on rebooting his Twitter follow list. It's great for a bunch of reasons. 1. Rex is a smart user. 2. He was inspired in part by Jay Rosen, who said in our July 27 podcast that he treats his subscription list as a resource for others who want to find people to follow in his field of expertise. 3. Rex relied on the rssCloud tool released earlier this week.  

Developers -- it's our job is to listen to smart users like Jay and Rex, and then give them the tools to create the revolution. We are at best enablers. I do mean best. When we see ourselves as the show, we miss the point. The users are what's happening.  

I started a mail list for developers working on rssCloud. Moderated at first to keep out the trolling and the spamming. 

Now, that's not to say that developers can't be users too. The best ones are, and man that is powerful because there can be really good communication betw the user and the developer if they're in the same body. A good example -- Matt Mullenweg had the idea to import his Twitter subscription list into Google Reader and it worked. However, all the subscriptions were imported at the top level, meaning he had a clean-up to do.  

So I added a feature to the app, if you add "&folder=1" to the end of the URL it creates an extra level in the OPML, designed for import into Google Reader (and probably other RSS aggregators as well). Example:  

http://tw.opml.org/get?user=jkottke&folder=1 

1. Save the list to your desktop.  

2. In Google Reader, click on Settings (in the upper-right corner of the window), then Import/Export.  

3. Click the Browse button and choose the file you saved above. 

4. Click the Upload button.  

5. When you return to the Google Reader main page, you'll see a new top-level section for your Twitter subscriptions. 

Now you can follow Twitter folk in Google Reader. Heh.  

Re Twitter's problems today. Centralized networks are especially vulnerable to DOS attacks. Loosely-coupled networks can do better. I wanted to post that to Twitter, but it's under attack. Not a joke, but something to continue to think about, planning for the future. 

Update: How do you manage the global namespace in a loosely-coupled 140-character message network.