/blog

Like Software has bugs. This is normal....

Ha! Don't I know it. 😊

Andy Sylvester has made his "My Status Tool" available for testing (it's on GitHub here). In his words, it is:

an application that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies

All the current buzz is on Mastodon and ActivityPub but RSS is a far simpler technology to implement and consume. rssCloud is, in my opinion, massively underused and we need more servers across the web to handle any increase in load, but it works, brilliantly.

Andy's tool is just the first step. I've mentioned before that this type of implementation can have a much wider impact that just sending status messages. The concept of a single unified feed, where you choose what it contains, is in its infancy but RSS (and rssCloud) could be an ideal way of getting started.

I've got namespaces on the brain (for obvious reasons) but using them to extend RSS could enable all sorts of functionality like replies and the 'two-way' RSS world that Dave Winer promotes and demonstrated with the User Feeds in FeedLand.

My Status Tool is build with node.js but the joy is that you could write a version in any language, all you need to do is consume and create RSS feeds. I might do a version in PHP – all the pieces already exist in the blog and /reader, I would just need to repurpose them in a new interface.