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DNS progress, another wish for a miracle

Saturday, September 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

There seems to be much progress on the DNS project I asked for a couple of days ago. Two or three developers seem to be approaching the point of deploying and the APIs probably are pretty close. I hope that when they surface we can try to get the APIs into agreement. The differences appear to be cosmetic.  

There's another project I'd like to wish into existence.  

I fell in love with the realtime API implemented by FriendFeed. Very simple, clever, reliable, functional, a kind of no-brainer that I wish more APIs were. The only problem was it only worked with FriendFeed, which is cool because there are a lot of interesting people there, but it got even more interesting when they released the back-end server, Tornado, as open source.  

This is good for two reasons: 1. It's really good interesting technology, and 2. It doesn't come from Google, it comes from Facebook, one of their rivals. Diversify is always a good strategy in the financial markets and in the tech world too.  

Anyway here's what I wish for. I'd like someone to show up in the rssCloud communithy with a Tornado server running that either is an instance of rssCloud (preferable) or is connected to an instance (i.e. receiving notifications). I'd then like to hook River2 up to this server through a persistent realtime connection so that it can be notified of updates through a NAT and firewall. Then of course I'd write up a Howto explaining how I did it, ask for feedback and hope that people create more software that interops. 

How about it? Anyone up for making some history??  

PS: I wasn't really a Deadhead, but I have lots of friends who are, and I admire much of the spririt of the community. One of the things they invented was this idea of needing a miracle. It comes from a John Perry Barlow/Bob Weir song. People talk about wanting "miracle tickets" -- that is, a ticket that gets you into something for free, like a Dead show. But the concept applies to airlines, baseball games, movies, private parties, you name it. It also applies to new Internet bootstraps. To get something like rssCloud booted, like Barlow and Weir, I need a miracle -- ever-ee day!