RSS shows its age in real-time web (SUP and XMPP to the rescue?)

December 21, 2008 By

The real time web is coming at us very quickly, but it exposes major problems in our RSS/Atom infrastructure.

What is the real-time web?

You can get a small taste of that by watching the 5,300+ people I’m watching in Real Time on friendfeed.

The first time I saw the real-time web, I saw it when my tweets showed up on Twitter search and friendfeed within minutes. Sometimes within seconds. Now, imagine a world where everything worked like that. That’s the real-time web.

The problem is that our blogs don’t participate in the real-time web. They publish via RSS. RSS is not real time. RSS only publishes when a service like Google Reader asks for it. It has no way to wave its hand and tell your reader “hey, there’s something new here for you to get.” So, most RSS aggregators just visit on a regular basis, looking every few minutes to see whether something new has shown up.

For blogs that’s just fine. After all, most blogs take a few minutes to a few hours to write and it won’t kill you if you don’t read my words here for 20 minutes or longer.

But there’s a new expectation that we’re having thanks to Twitter. We want everything now in real time. I want to see everything that was published now and respond to it now and I want to have conversations about all that in real time.

This works on Twitter and friendfeed, which were built on real-time principles (er, messaging principles) rather than Web principles.

But when you try to hook the real-time web up to the old creaky RSS web, well, you see that the two aren’t very compatible.

Today I tried to setup an ego feed where I could track stuff that uses my name from around the web in real time. It doesn’t work very well. It’s slow. And, worse, friendfeed can’t tell where the original item came from so it gives it a generic RSS icon. So, it’s not only not real time but it’s ugly as well. I talked more about that with a bunch of people on friendfeed today.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, the geeks are exploring two technologies.

The first is XMPP. This is protocol developed for instant messaging applications but Twitter and friendfeed and others have adopted it. This is why when you Tweet the message shows up in friendfeed so fast.

The second is SUP. This was designed by friendfeed to be more efficient, like RSS. But with the added benefit that the feed provider can raise its hand and say “I have something new for you.” This makes real-time feeding possible, as developer Jeff Smith demonstrates when he built a system that shoved data into friendfeed in just a microsecond.

The third is GNIP, which is trying to build a service that stands between all sorts of services that are supporting the real-time web.

The problem? Very few services that could help the real-time web evolve are using either of these two protocols.

In fact, I was shown a real-time news service that’ll come out in March that didn’t use either of these protocols. Why? They didn’t even know that a real-time web was evolving on Twitter and FriendFeed and that there are dozens of tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck that are built on top of those too. Which is why I’m writing this post.

If you’re a developer, are you thinking about how to make your feeds real time? Why not?

One reason I can see is that it increases the bandwidth needed, especially if you’re pushing out a lot of data. So, in this harsh economic times developers might be unwilling to spend more resources. But there are some things, like searches, that need real-time results. I’d love to hear what developers are thinking here about balancing the need for low-cost systems with real-time publishing.

More info on SUP and the real-time web:

Paul Bucheit, co-founder of friendfeed, started a whole discussion about it.
OurDoings, a photosharing service, was one of the first services that supported the real-time web on friendfeed and they wrote about their experiences with SUP here.
The friendfeed blog has more info on the release of SUP.
Derek van Vilet made a WordPress plugin for SUP and explains that here.

UPDATE: Mike Taylor says I should have mentioned some XMPP resources in this friendfeed conversation. Here’s the ones he recommended: http://xmpp.org
http://metajack.im/
http://stpeter.im/

http://ralphm.net/blog/

Jonathan Jesse, in same friendfeed thread, added: “Robert: on Leo Laporte’s FLOSS Weekly they covered XMPP with one of the developers and the guy who writes the documentation for Jabber is a great overview of XMPP and more info: http://twit.tv/floss49 ”

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Geek and Poke pokes at me

December 16, 2008 By

Funny Geek and Poke comic today, in reaction to my post yesterday about real-time news.

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Guy Kawasaki says outrageous things about Twitter

December 12, 2008 By

Guy Kawasaki is a pretty influential guy and when he says “Twitter is a weapon,” in an interview I did with him my ears perk up.

But he got more outrageous from there. He took on TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington with a challenge. Guy would rather give up his cell phone for a week than give up Twitter for a week.

Oh, Guy said a few other fun things. Which is what you’d expect from the first technology evangelist (a role he held at Apple back in the early 1980s).

Not to mention that he started a cool social media directory, AllTop, and promptly put his own name at the top of the ego page. Oh, he’s not just outrageous about Twitter. In reality we were there to discuss his new book, Reality Check: the Irrreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

“I’m so sold on Twitter.”(1 minute in)

“I think Twitter is, arguably, the most powerful branding mechanism since television.” (2 minutes in)

The essence of a good pitch (3 minutes in)

“I would sell to Toyota,” when I asked him what he’d do about GM (4 minutes in)

Twitter should be bailed out by the government (4:45 in)

“The thing that drives your competition crazy the most is when you are successfull and they are not.” (7 minutes in)

“Is your boss an asshole?” (10 minutes in). Leads to a fun discussion about Steve Jobs. Funny how that happens!

Why your company can’t be successful like Apple or Google just buy spending money on goodies (14 minutes in)

“For me, Twitter is more important than a cell phone.” (16 minutes in)

“Twitter is a weapon.” (17 minutes in)

Thanks Guy for inviting me over for a fun conversation. Now back to Twitter. Follow Guy @guykawasaki and follow me @scobleizer.

UPDATE: over on FastCompanyTV this video is getting more comments than any other in recent memory, which brings on this outrageous Scoble rule: get a famous Twitterer to say outrageous things about Twitter and you’ll get more comments on your blog.

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10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not

December 8, 2008 By

Dave Winer talks about why FriendFeed hasn’t gotten super popular yet. He thinks there’s space for a new service between Twitter and FriendFeed. Everyone knows I’m FriendFeed’s #1 customer, but I’ve been studying the two services for a while and have found 10 reasons why FriendFeed isn’t right for you.

1. Twitter has one way to get content into the system. You see a box. You type. You push a button that says “update.” Compare this to FriendFeed. Let’s try to count the ways you can get content into the system.

  • a. the standard way on the top of the page, but there you have to choose whether you are putting in a message, a link, a photo.
  • b. Import your site. Or your Flickr. Or your YouTube. Or your Facebook. Or your Twitter stream. Or your blog. Or your Disqus comments. Or your Upcoming.org stream. Etc. Etc. There are 59 services that can be brought into FriendFeed. Very few services do the same for Twitter.
  • c. You can “Like” an item. Here’s all my likes. There’s 11,500 of them so far, which shows another problem: too much content to go through on FF. Twitter actually has a similar feature, called Favorites, but no one actually uses that.
  • d. You can “Comment” on an item. Here’s my comments. More than 6,000 of them. You really don’t want that kind of distraction. You might have to participate and that wouldn’t be good.
  • e. Then there’s the FriendFeed toolbar bookmarklet.
  • I’m probably missing five other ways you can get content into FriendFeed. Like emailing in items.

2. Twitter has one display of messages that are 140 characters long. You can’t handle the responsibility of longer messages. Plus FriendFeed’s messages include photos. YouTube videos. Play inline audio links. And more. You can’t handle those distractions. Twitter is for you.

3. FriendFeed has a search engine that’s just like Twitter’s search engine. Except you can use that search engine to only search certain data types. On Twitter you only have one datatype. So much less confusing.

4. On Twitter you follow people by your friends telling you their Twitter address. Mine is http://www.twitter.com/scobleizer or you will see someone replying to me by using @scobleizer and you’ll click that link and then click “follow.” FriendFeed has a whole list of recommended users that you’ll need to consider when first signing up for the service. The recommendations, if you’ve followed me, will include such people like Mike Arrington, Charlene Li, Corvida, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Jason Calacanis, David Sifry, and many other people. Now you’ll need to consider how those people got recommended to you and that might hurt your brain. On Twitter it just shows you who I’m following on the right side of the page — members who’ve been on longer are on top of that list.

5. Your friends are on Twitter, they don’t yet know what FriendFeed is. So, FriendFeed is totally lame. Of course, if you aren’t in the tech industry, or a US President Elect (er, his staff), or an NBC Camera Man, a well-known wine seller, a supply-chain manager in China, or a well-known newsman on CNN, you probably are actually on Facebook, but that’s a whole nother blog post.

6. FriendFeed doesn’t have Direct Messaging. Twitter does. Twitter FTW!

7. FriendFeed has rooms. Twitter doesn’t. Rooms seem a lot like old-school mailing lists. Makes your head hurt, so they can’t be a good thing.

8. If you don’t want to see someone on Twitter anymore, you unfollow them. If you don’t want them to see you either, you block them. But that’s about it. FriendFeed does both of those but then also lets you hide posts. Did you know you can hide just someone’s Flickr photos? Or her Tweets? Or both? Too confusing. You can’t handle that, which is why Twitter is for you. Any service that has a tutorial on how to use a feature is just not for you.

9. FriendFeed has this Real Time feature. Here’s my RealTime Feed which shows 5,000 people being aggregated together. Twitter doesn’t do that, although Twitter search gets close. You just can’t handle that kind of distraction. Did you know you can put that real time stream on the sidebar on Firefox? You really can’t handle that. It’ll distract you to no end.

10. Twitter has more apps like TweetDeck, Twhirl, a ton of iPhone apps, etc. FriendFeed doesn’t have nearly as many third-party apps, so it can’t be as useful.

I could keep going, but that’s why there are millions of people on Twitter and hundreds of thousands of people on FriendFeed.

Let’s meet in six more months and see if anything has changed. Until then, FriendFeed is just not for you. Sorry.

Filed Under: technology industry Tagged With: ,

10 reasons why Twitter Direct Messages suck (and so do Facebook’s)

December 6, 2008 By

OK, over on Twitter they have this feature. It’s called “Direct Messages.” It means you can send me a Tweet that no one else can see. A LOT of people try to use this feature with me and I really, really, hate it. How many people? I have 4,388 direct messages.

Twitter isn’t the only one that sucks, either. Facebook has a Messaging feature too. 1,249 messages are waiting for me there.

I do NOT answer in either place most of the time. Why? Here’s 10 reasons why they suck and why I’d much rather you email me at scobleizer@gmail.com or, simply, just ask me a question in public!

1. I can’t delete them all. So I ignore them all.
2. I can’t put them into folders. So, no way to prioritize them. Or, if you are a Gmail addict, no way to tag messages.
3. No way to resort them. No way to see old messages. Or messages from someone specific. Email has those features.
4. No way to forward messages. That means they are useless for business. If you ask me a business question I MUST forward the question and get approvals. No way to do that on Twitter.
5. No way to BCC messages. In email I can copy my boss blindly so you can’t see that I’m doing that. That’s a way that I can keep him involved in my life and up to date on all the wild promises I’m making to people. That’s why I don’t make promises on Twitter or Facebook.
6. You ask me a question that requires a 500 word response but you ask it in a place that limits me to 140 characters. Thanks for frustrating me.
7. I can’t respond to your own DM’s unless you follow me. Seriously. The design of Twitter’s DM’s +is+ that lame.
8. I can’t put an auto answer onto DM’s so that I can tell you to get a clue and to send me email instead.
9. I can’t CC, or copy other people, or send a message to a group. Things that email has been able to do for years.
10. I can’t move my DM’s out of Twitter and into other systems. That’s something that I’ve been able to do with email for years and it’s served me well. Even Hotmail lets me forward emails to Gmail.
11. UPDATE, this just came in via Twitter from @TraciKnoppe: “@Scobleizer Use your great influence for good & get Twitter to chng the DM req. & API limits. Make it so number one. :P ”

Anyway, I hate DMs. Don’t you? @ev can we get these things fixed? Yes, that’s my form of direct messaging @ev because this feature has caused me so much hell over the years.

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Twitter (and all social networks) will never be the same thanks to PeopleBrowsr

December 5, 2008 By

For the past few weeks I’ve been using PeopleBrowsr. Very cool. It’s the most significant thing to happen to social networking since FriendFeed came on the scene a year ago.

It was launched on FriendFeed and look at the reaction. That tells me that this is going to see significant growth because it delivers features that people need from Twitter, like grouping and ability to augment contacts, that Twitter and other social networks have been unable to deliver.

Here’s CEO Jodee Rich demoing it to me, I highly recommend you try this if you are a social networking freak like me.

[kyte.tv appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118/280023&tbid=k_418&premium=true&height=500&width=425]

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