Yesterday afternoon Twitter made a fundamental change to the options available to users by eliminating the option to receive messages from our friends sent publicly to people we are not following. We called it a disaster that would seriously disrupt serendipitous discovery of interesting friends of our friends.
Twitter has offered two explanations for the change. First, that very few users were choosing to receive these kinds of messages anyway and that it was confusing. Then, this morning, the company put up a blog post saying simply that "there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt--it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever." So what's the story? Here's our best guess.
The Facebook Newsfeed: so much juicy information, so little access to it. Last week we wrote about a new Facebook app that turned your newsfeed into an RSS feed you could subscribe to outside of Facebook. It was really useful and now it's gone.
Even the app's developer agrees that the app crossed the line, overstepping Facebook's much celebrated privacy controls. We're still disappointed though, and we wish that this rich source of data could be opened up for developers and users to build value on top of. What kind of publishing system doesn't offer an RSS feed? A fundamentally closed one.
Today marks the second annual "Blue Beanie Day," an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman's blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.
We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.
According to Forrester Research, we're in the initial phases of a new 16-year cycle of technology innovation and growth called "IT Everywhere." This shift comes on the heels of the previous cycle which brought us networked computing technologies for our enterprise applications and the Internet. During this transitional period, CIOs need to be aware of which trends from the older cycle are still important and which of the new trends they should also be paying attention to. Forrester has summed up their findings in a recent report which focuses on these emerging trends.
I've always wanted to namecheck that great Velvet Underground song. I wore my teeth in my hands...So I could mess the hair of the night. Anyway, Sébastien Paquet has posted a suggestion to improve the Topic Exchange - which reminded me of my own efforts to ignite the topics community over a month ago. Here's Seb's post:
I believe I have finally seen the light as to how the Internet Topic Exchange (ITE) could be made simpler to use and more viral at once, taking one cue from my colleague Stephen's recent ridiculously easy shibboleth strategy for putting together conference aggregators and another from Joshua Shachter's now-defunct reversible.org
1. Right now submitting a post to a channel requires people to either fill in a form on the channel page of their choice or send a TrackBack ping to the channel. Both are simple, but still harder than they should. How about adding a third option: simply link to the channel in your post. To make it easier, the top of each channel page could even provide some standard boilerplate chunk of the requisite HTML.
2. In order for this to work the ITE needs to watch the participating weblogs. It already watches for weblog updates, so just let people register their blog or feed once and let the ITE pick out the posts that link to it as they appear thereafter.
Note that this new option automagically generates visibility for the channels on participating blogs with every post submitted; this is one of the key elements that were missing for effective word-of-mouth propagation of awareness of the Exchange. I'm kicking myself for having taken so long to find a simpler way.
Of course, along with ease of use comes more spam. I've been thinking about this too - more later.
Here's what I posted in Seb's comments (tided up a bit):
This is pretty much what I was getting at a month or so ago, only I wanted Topic Exchange and K-Collector to play together more. Ref: Proposed Solution for ENT Topic-Sharing Community and the follow-ups here and here. And this is what I ended up with - K-Collector picks up my posts via my ENT-enabled RSS feed. And my weblog automatically pings Topic Exchange every time I post, via my use of MT categories (which match up with Topic Exchange names).
You propose people include the TE link in their post, which is similar to what I do - only I include the link on a reference tacked onto the end of the post (so it doesn't actually form part of the post itself). This way works for me, because it means I don't have to manually enter the link - MT does it automagically for me. The downside of my method is that I use pre-defined categories, which does limit the topic selection somewhat. But I balanced this by knowing that my topics/categories match now with *both* Topic Exchange and K-Collector, which was what I wanted.
Anywho, good luck with your proposal. If it helps more people adopt TE then it's a good thing.
Topic navigation is up and running on Read/Write Web, including cross-posting to both K-Collector and Topic Exchange. You'll notice on the main menu, it now lists internal topics (or categories if you prefer - you say tom-ah-to, I say tom-ay-to). And in my RSS file, I've added references to both KC and TE. Here's basically what I added in the MT template:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>" ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>/"><$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topicRoll.opml">
<ent:topic ent:classification="what" ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topic?topic=
<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>" ent:id="<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>"><$MTEntryCategory$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
The KC and TE references are pretty similar, except that KC doesn't need the dirify="1" bit for the topic name. Dirify in this context just means the topic value is made lower-case and if it's a double word an underscore is added between the two words.
At the end of each individual post, you'll now notice there are 3 links: the first one takes you to the Read/Write Web archive for the topic I've specified for the post. The next two links take you to the respective KC and TE pages for that topic. This is all done automatically using the <MTCategory> tag (oh, did I mention I'm using Category now instead of Keyword?).
There is one downside: sometimes TE and KC won't have the same topic name as me. In the case of this post here, I'm using the topic name "Movable Type" - which is fine because both TE and KC have a topic by that name. But a lot of times the topics don't synch. But that's a whole other issue, which I can't fix by myself.
So that's me done with topics for a little while. I'm going to relax a bit this week and write up some laid-back R/WW posts.
Matt Mower's written a great explanation of how the K-Collector aggregation process works. KC is a very clever system and I'm pleased to hear it doesn't actually require the KC client app on Radio or MT in order for people to participate in the KC community.
What I will do is continue with my own experiments with Movable Type. I already have the TE cloud reference in my RSS template, so I'll add the KC cloud reference too. Then as I write posts I'll add topics using my chosen MT field (at this stage 'Keyword', but I'll probably change to 'Category').
Note that I could download the MT client Matt's created, but I'd actually rather play around myself with MT and see how both KC and TE pick up my posts.
Likewise, I've asked Phil Pearson if Topic Exchange can pick up my ENT data from my RSS feed automatically. If I can get both KC and TE aggregating my ENT data, without me having to ping either one, I'll be a happy man :-)
Also I should perhaps clarify my goals with all this. In the short-term I want to:
1) Set-up MT so that I can add topic data to both KC and TE.
2) Set-up my own internal topic navigation, which ideally I'd like to synch with KC and TE (in terms of topic names).
For now I'll leave the hard part aside - i.e. synching topic data between KC and TE. Matt's done a lot of work on this in the past, using XFML and XTM and so forth, and so he can tell you it's not a trivial task. So let's call that a long-term goal.
I guess my remaining goal for the short-term is to try and convince Phil to get TE to automatically aggregate my ENT data from my RSS feed. But being a humble user, I've no idea how difficult a request this is - i.e. it's easy for me to ask the question, it may be a lot harder for Phil to do the work ;-) So I don't want to press the issue...
Also, I want to investigate Blogdigger some more to see how I can tie in my topic navigation experiments with Bloggdigger's categorisation system. Greg - any ideas for that?
There's already been a great response to my post last night (see the comments to previous entry). Greg suggested his aggregator Blogdigger could be included in this - I agree! Matt and Andrew also posted very thoughtful responses.
Here's some of my feedback (copied from the comments - I must get these enabled inline...):
Overnight while pondering my post (which I regard as just a 'starter for 10' btw, not a final solution by any means), I did conclude that KC essentially already does what I describe - polls registered RSS feeds with ENT in them and aggregates them. It would be great if TE also had that functionality.
It's the client ping that I think is unnecessary and possibly holding back community uptake - with TE the ping is a manual process for the blogger, and with KC you need to install an add-on tool to enable the pinging. Both require too much manual effort for the blogger (IMHO of course). eg Bloglines does all its aggregation automatically (every hour I think), with no pinging required from the blogger.
Although Andrew I take your point about bandwidth utilization. But if Bloglines (and Blogdigger) can do it, why not KC and TE?
A few weeks ago I suggested merging Topic Exchange and K-Collector together, or at least bring the two sets of functionality closer together. I figure I'll take a leaf out of Marc Canter's book and try and rally the community together on this project. I'm hoping the respective developers of Topic Exchange and K-Collector can get together and figure out some easy solutions. I'm happy to set up a mailing list or wiki to co-ordinate this?
It has to start somewhere and where better than from a humble user's perspective - i.e. me. So here's what I've done so far to get the ball rolling and I want to challenge others to build on this (or if its wrongheaded, suggest other ways to merge KC and TE's functionality).
When I was using Radio Userland, I had my site hooked up to K-Collector using their add-on tool for Radio Userland. When I moved to Movable Type a couple of weeks ago, I had to cease my connection to K-Collector because as far as I know it's a Radio Userland-only tool (although there was talk of an MT add-on being developed?). So tonight I did some tinkering with my blog, to
1) try and re-enable community topic sharing for my weblog; and
2) to resume my project to get an internal topic navigation system running (I had done some initial work with XSLT at the beginning of the year, but that fell by the wayside...).
Now, there is one major thing that Topic Exchange and K-Collector have in common: they both use ENT (Easy News Topics), which is an extension of RSS. Paulo and Matt created ENT as a simple form of topic mapping - and recently they've been talking of upgrading it. When I used Radio, whenever I published a post I also selected some topics from the K-Collector Radio add-on tool. This added the topics to my RSS feed, like so:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topicRoll.opml">
<ent:topic ent:classification="what"
ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topic?topic=strategy"
ent:id="strategy">Strategy</ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
As I understand it, the K-Collector website then aggregated my post to whatever KC topic was specified in the ENT tags in my RSS file ("Strategy" in the example above).
Because I'm using Movable Type now, I needed to find another way to specify topics. The great thing about MT is that it has spare fields where you can basically add whatever you like. So I decided to use the previously unused "Keyword" field to hold all my Topic data. This will serve two purposes: 1) I can hopefully get Topic Exchange and K-Collector to aggregate my posts based on the topic data I enter using this field (more on that in a minute); and 2) I will use it also for my own internal topic navigation. So this allows me to match my own topic navigation to the community topics (in TE and KC).
The next thing I did was alter my RSS template. Firstly I declared the ENT namespace in the <rss> element, like so:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:ent="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">
Next, I added the ENT tags. Now for this I decided to start off using Topic Exchange, because it happens to be a perfect fit with the <$MTEntryKeywords$> tag which I'm using for my topics. If you look at the Topic Exchange RSS feeds for each channel, it makes it easy to swap in my MTEntryKeyword. e.g. this is from the TE "Technology" topic:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="technology" ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/technology/">
technology</ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
Because all the TE URL's are in the format "http://topicexchange.com/t/" and the id perfectly matches the topic name, it's easy for me to swap in my MTEntryKeyword. Here's what I added to my RSS template in MT:
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="<$MTEntryKeywords$>"
ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/<$MTEntryKeywords$>/">
<$MTEntryKeywords$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
I added this just above the ending <item> tag.
NB: it may be just as easy to do this with KC, I haven't checked that yet. However KC has the additonal component of the ent:classification tag, so I decided to tackle TE first as it didn't have that extra tag.
So that's my RSS file ENT-enabled. Now whenever I add a new entry to my weblog, I simply enter the Topic Exchange topic name into my "Keywords" field. When published, this adds it to my RSS file in the ENT tags specified above - which at the moment map exactly to Topic Exchange's format. But...I still have to manually send a ping to TE under the current TE system.
So here's my suggestion (and I apologise if this has been suggested before - I'm sure it has!). What if we, the users, could register our RSS files with Topic Exchange and K-Collector, and both of those services then regularly poll all registered RSS files - say hourly - and pick up any new posts that have ENT tags in them? So in effect Topic Exchange and K-Collector act like RSS Aggregators (e.g. Bloglines) and poll users RSS files, rather than the users having to manually ping the TE and KC websites. It makes more sense for the Aggregator to do the work, rather than the person/blogger.
The beauty of this idea is that we - the users - can use ENT as our 'Topic Central'. That is, we specify our topics in the RSS - and that's the end of our part of the job. It's then up to the TE and KC aggregators to poll registered RSS files and collect all the new ENT tagged data. If e.g. both TE and KC have a topic named "technology", then great they won't have to do any work to add them to their respective clouds. There is a bit of work of course when the topic names and/or ids don't match up - but that's solvable surely? e.g. some form of topic mapping between TE and KC.
So what do you all think? I'd really like to see some action to merge the functionality of TE and KC together - for the good of the community (rah rah!).
I mentioned in my last post that one of my ongoing interests is topic mapping in weblogs. Topic Exchange and K-Collector are two initiatives that I've hyped a lot over the last year. However the blogosphere still doesn't have a mainstream topic-mapping application - and I mean mainstream as in Technorati or Bloglines, apps that are used by a large percentage of bloggers.
Seb Paquet recently re-opened the conversation on topic-mapping in blogs, and Rogers Cadenhead and Dave Winer have been talking about it, so it's on peoples minds. I'd like to suggest the following...
We need to meld the best features of Topic Exchange and K-Collector.
Topic Exchange and K-Collector each has its strengths. K-Collector has a great add-on for Radio Userland, which allows you to easily select relevant topics and add them to the community server. Topic Exchange requires you to send a trackback ping to its server for each topic, which makes it more open and extensible but also more effort for the blogger. Topic Exchange has a strong user community - it's like an open source project. K-Collector seems to be aiming at a corporate market and so that's where their development focus is I think. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it does mean I'm more emotionally attached to Topic Exchange these days.
So the two development efforts can learn from each other. For example, it'd be great if Topic Exchange can automate its ping process a bit more (I'll try and think more about this, so I can offer some potential solutions), and K-Collector can keep the blogosphere in the loop regarding its continued development (e.g. more updates, especially to the mailing list).
I wonder if it's worthwhile merging Topic Exchange and K-Collector? There is so much talent in each project, but perhaps topic mapping has its best chance of gaining mainstream acceptance if we work under one umbrella "project". What do you reckon, am I getting all hippie about this or is a combined project a viable solution?
Cross-posted to Topic Exchange and K-Collector
