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Twitter's "What's Happening?" box
By Dave Winer on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 12:45 PM.

A picture named sadelephantsmall.jpgOne of the huge pieces of prior art for my minimal blogging tool is the What's Happening? box on Twitter. It's almost like magic, esp combined with a bookmarklet. You're on a web page that you want to link to from Twitter. Click the bookmarklet. The title and a shortened link appear in the What's Happening box. Edit. Submit. Back. You're in and out real quick.  permalink

It's why Twitter is, for me at least, what del.icio.us is for others. No problem sharing the link, but I'm primarily motivated to save the link as places I want to come back to later. permalink

So as I've been honing my.reallysimple.org, I finally had to deal with this. How to reconcile two aspects of the app: permalink

1. It's designed to output RSS. permalink

2. I want the stuff to flow through Twitter. permalink

Turns out this is a bit of a difficult question.  permalink

What it boils down to: If you had to map the Twitter "What's happening" box onto a feed, would it be the title or the description? permalink

I think it's clearly the description. Because titles are (intuitively) one-line things. The Twitter box is multiple lines. That's the description. permalink

I wrote up the problem in more detail on my changes page. permalink

Comments, respectful of course, and not personal -- are welcome. permalink

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