/blog

Obligatory moody black & white shot of clouds on the Dales.

PHP-MST has completely stolen my spare cognitive resource, creating the standalone, file-based version of /reader has taken a back seat.

I know why:

1. it's easier to build, and
2. because it is a riff on Andy's node.js app there is a social element to its development

The indieweb movement preaches scratching your own itch but it's often more fun to collaborate or do something in tandem – even if you're working on separate things the interaction between them adds extra fuel to the creative fire.

Still, once I've gotten this to the point I will share it with the world, I will be able to take certain things I've learnt back to the other project. It's productive procrastination.

I see the type of communication enabled by a 'My Status Tool' type service as fairly ephemeral. It's the very nature of the beast. As items are distributed and consumed via RSS they will only have the limited lifespan of the time they remain in the feed. New will replace old.

Some might argue that this exacerbates the problems of the current social web but I'm not convinced.

I like the idea that it would be a transient medium – unless you wanted to start looking at item storage. I don't think we should unless it was, itself, limited and temporary.

PHP-MST is a 'live state' instance (pulling in from RSS feeds on the fly, I don't know how Andy is doing it) and that transience means it would best serve a small group. (Pulling in too many feeds on the fly would slow things down.)

There is probably an ideal number of items in a feed to avoid messages and conversations disappearing ¹ but this would likely be dependent on the number of people connected to the same 'network'.

I think I'm overanalysing this.