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A-Plus for Twitter!
Thursday, April 15, 2010 by Dave Winer.
Song of the day: "I've been across this country, from Denver to the ocean. And I never met girls who could sing so sweet as the angels that live in Houston." 
To me there's nothing better than driving across the Great Plains of the United States.
It's like a meditation. What's left of the Rockies at one end, rolling hills and farmland in the east.
While I was driving yesterday, Twitter announced two really cool APIs that I haven't had a look at yet, but am excited to when this eastward movement draws to an abrupt close when I hit the Atlantic Ocean. Which seems will happen on Saturday.
The first new API gives us the Payloads I've been asking for since 2007. Awesome!
I was pretty sure it was coming this week when I wrote this piece last Friday.
Basically all the features of RSS attached to a tweet, with the same ability for ad hoc expansion. Very interesting computer science with, imho and if there are no brick walls, and if it performs reasonably well, infinite possibility for new apps. Once again, something worth getting excited about in TwitterLand. First time in a long time.
The second new feature is a stream-oriented API. Again, I haven't had a look yet -- but this is the feature that made the FriendFeed API so nice. Let's hope the Twitter guys did it as simply.
Anyway, to the Twitter folk, A-plus on the update. Lots of fertile ground for meedia hackers like myself. Something nice to talk about at the 140conf next Tues in NYC.
Gotta hit the road. I'm headed toward Ann Arbor, Michigan tonight. In the Eastern Time Zone! 
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Dave Winer, 54, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He 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
© Copyright 1994-2010 Dave Winer
.Last update: 4/15/2010; 3:09:05 AM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
