DISQUS

computerjoe · 1 year ago

Great point. Perhaps with Twitter, it may be time for some external sites to start capturing everything via RSS as a backup...

Avery · 1 year ago

Hi Dave, I've preserved the most memorable incarnation of the info.cern.ch site here: http://shii.org/history/TheProject.html

I also preserved the What's New "weblog" you might have been thinking of, here: http://shii.org/history/whatsnew/

The W3C has an older copy of info.cern.ch here: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hy...

crabasa · 1 year ago

I just had a conversation with a buddy in the Bay Area about Twitter. He had some interesting insights into the sweet deal they got on SMS integration from the wireless carries (it's capped at a reasonable figure per month). This, of course, is one of the differentiators that Twitter has that can't simply be replicated by decentralizing.

But SMS notifications aside, caching feeds requires a much smarter client. Right now Twitter clients can call a single method (friends_timeline) to get updates for a user and those she or he follows. The caching solution means that a Twitter client will have to know who you are following, so that it can get the proper feeds and splice them together into a coherent time line.

Which kind of bring me back around to my feeling that Twitter is kind of a walled-garden of blogging and blog-reading, where you "follow" instead of subscribe, etc. I feel like the better long-term solution is for bloggers to create RSS feeds for their micro-blogging and provide an open API that blogging tools can implement (remember Trackback?) to notify blogger that people are "following" them.

More: http://cubanlinks.org/articles/2008/4/22/twitte...

Jay Fienberg · 1 year ago

The centralization thing bugs / worries me too. I finally started grabbing my tweets via RSS and automatically reposting them to a special section of one of my blogs. Obviously, once in my blog, their "archival" home on the web can be on my blog (personally, I'd just assume delete all of my old tweets off Twitter at some point).

If I used Twitter in a more conversational / meme-oriented way, I'd want to grab the tweets of people I follow, which Twitter supports. I could imagine groups of people using this technique to create their own, shared, tweet archives.

jdavey · 1 year ago

I'm a big believer at keeping core conversations on the blog where they belong, but I don't know how worried we should be about Twitter at all. Well some excellent conversations could be lost, the best of the best are usually taken from Twitter and expanding on via personal blogs. Plus Twitter's link structure is all connected to destinations outside of the major platform. I don't think the disappearance of Twitter would be as devastating as you make it seem. Friendfeed on the other hand, with its web-wide aggregations and interactive capabilities would be an entirely different story.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Dave, I'm just wondering why you used a Canadian flag for the post -- a subliminal vote for Canada as the saviour of the distributed Web, or just a flag that happens to be red?

dave · 1 year ago

I like the Canadian flag, and yes it's red. There are lots of red flags. China, the USSR, but the Canadian one was the most neutral and symbolic of a kind country that doesn't try to control anyone else (as far as I know).

OliverShulman · 1 year ago

Oh please Dave, Canadians have been "controlling" their indigenous peoples for centuries.

Scott Rosenberg · 1 year ago

Thanks for those links, Shii. Those "What's New" pages are from NCSA, not from CERN. I'd found the W3C pages you point to. The thing is, they (and an earlier one at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hy...) represent, as far as I can tell, web postings of a quarterly "What's New at CERN" newsletter. As you can see, it is not exactly blog-like in form. In his book (and via private correspondence I've had with his staff), Berners-Lee specifically recalls posting listings of new servers as they came online, in a reverse-chronological format. And that's what Dave says he recalls too. So I'm reasonably confident such a thing existed. Unfortunately, no one at W3C (or anywhere else that I've been able to find) seems to have preserved a copy...

Avery · 1 year ago

Hi Scott, I believe the NCSA page originally served that purpose as well. As you can see from the earliest archives it starts out simply recording servers as they come online. I have a Yellow Pages-style book of websites from 1995 and it mentions CERN but only as a doorway to the pages you see on my archive of it.

There are two separate lists you can see in both the 1992 and 1995 caches: the "What's out there?" directory that became the Virtual Library, and the list of servers here: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hy... which I assume from the filename later became the list of "registered" servers organized by country in 1995.

Either of those could be what you're thinking of-- I'd put my money on the latter. But if you're looking for something blog-like that appeared between November 1992 and 1995, then CERN and NCSA would have been competing... which seems unlikely to me.

ted dziuba · 1 year ago

Well, whatever protocol you guys come up for this, make sure the name contains the letter X.

JohnRoquemore · 1 year ago

Creating a complete decentralized solution must be the goal of every new web technology.

Finding a way to create revenue streams from this is more difficult but will ultimately generate more money.

johnbreslin · 1 year ago

We've recently written a paper showing (one prototype called SMOB of) how distributed / decentralised microblogging can work: "Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach"

http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2008/paper...

The SMOB prototype code (both the semantic microblogging publishing client and server-based web service) is available at:

http://smob.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

See some pictures and more information on my blog post at:

http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/05/09/prot...

muratbiskin · 1 year ago

we need it yes

Christoph Jaggi · 1 year ago

http://info.cern.ch/