Welcome!

[Jesse Stay]

People are still trickling in, but I wanted to say welcome, and thanks for joining this collaboration!  I just wanted to start by sharing a couple goals that I'd like to achieve:

1. A more open web - more than anything, I want this to lead to a much more open web, distributed, and free of any one company controlling the flow of data

2. I want to start by producing a service of some sort - perhaps a gateway, where any site can send and receive data to the gateway in their own formats, and then send and receive data to Twitter clients in the exact same format Twitter sends and receives data.  For a client like Tweetie to connect to the server they should only have to change the base URL they are pointing API calls to and our open source service should produce data in a format those clients understand.  If a provider wants to send images and files in a Twitter-like format, we should allow a way for them to post those, and we then format it to a link in a micro-blog-like format.  It should "just work".

3. Open Source - all software and libraries produced from this should be open source.

4. Open Standards - at first, this should just duplicate what Twitter is doing, but eventually I'd like for this to be a governing source for determining the standard around what the front-end microblogging API (the "Twitter-like endpoint") produces.  If we want to add a meta layer on top of it all we should discuss that.  If we want to add real-time tie-ins to it all we should discuss that.  We should document it all somewhere and ensure it is available and modifiable by anyone who wants to contribute.

Anyway, welcome, and let's keep this discussion going.  What would you like to see from this?  I don't even have to lead this - I just want to make it all happen.  It could even work with RSS or Atom or rssCloud or PSHB - the only requirement necessary is that the front end has to "speak Twitter".  Are my suggestions the best way of doing this?  Any preferred languages? (I'm a Perl developer - happy to use my favorite language of course, but if you'd like to contribute let's find something we can all agree on)

Thanks for joining!

Jesse Stay

Just a guy that wants a more open web :-)

http://staynalive.com

[bear]

I've always thought that one of the simplest ways to achieve a level
of "open" twitter (using lower case to just imply the data not the
service) would be to quickly map one or two of the primary open data
formats/protocols to the twitter data model. This would allow say
Activity Streams or RSS to be used as the data transport and then
gateways or "exchange" points could speak the twitter api (and
others).

Doing this would allow PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud or whatever to be used
as external feeds to this system.

Existing 3rd party Twitter clients could interface via the current
twitter API and after a while they could also offer other interfaces.

But this is also just a quick thought after a long day of battling
close to 2 feet of snow :)

thanks,

[Jesse Stay]

Bear, that's exactly my thought as well.  I think we're in-line with this.  Regarding the Tornado framework I mentioned earlier, I think it already supports some of this, so it wouldn't be that hard to add what's missing.

Jesse

[Mark Essel]

As a developer I love the idea of a "universal translator".
Can we identify the hurdles (aka challenge in getting Facebook
statuses).
Is this too big a problem for just a few people?

I'm going to help but you'll have to deal with my terribly limited
schedule and slowness.

[Jesse Stay]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Mark Essel <mes...@gmail.com> wrote:

As a developer I love the idea of a "universal translator".
Can we identify the hurdles (aka challenge in getting Facebook
statuses).
Is this too big a problem for just a few people?

I'm going to help but you'll have to deal with my terribly limited
schedule and slowness.

Mark, I'm thinking I'm going to try and get a simple server together and set up a Github repository or something similar that we can all download, fork, and contribute.  At the same time we should probably start putting together documentation on what the Twitter side should take, along with what the data transport side would take.

Regarding Facebook statuses, I think that would be up to Facebook as to whether they want to push those out through such an interface.  I think we should stick to basics that would make it easy for a provider to push and receive data in just a few formats like RSS and Atom - getting it to those formats will be the responsibility of the provider.

Jesse