I agree with James that the beauty of Twitter is that it is not yet spoiled by weight and Google like algorithms, but the user decides whom to follow and makes his own weights.

If Twitter or anyone else thinks they are doing the user a favour by boosting for the users’ view the twitter accounts that have the most followers or the most RTs or whatever the algorithm is, they are wrong. It serves only the ad agency Google and others that want to profit. I think we’re at the point now at all these free services is that we want to see companies monetarize and sustain them, but not by imposing their ideologies on the content, and that means whatever is first in view.

Internet search as it is now is dominated by the “bigco” Google, biggest of them all, and its friends, like Wikipedia, a “bigorg” that dominates first place in every search not because it’s necessarily good, or non-biased, or helpful, but because loads of people link to it because…loads of other people link to it because…it is always pushed and shoved up first by search algorithms.

That there are supposed to be correctives in Google that means that “actually doesn’t happen” doesn’t persuade me, simply because now I have Twitter to see how it works without the Silicon Valley finger on the weight scale. (Of course some services have twiterati to see, and Ev and Biz try to sway it with their favoured accounts but most users ignore it).

I’m still trying to figure out why I need RSS, given that I have twitter, except, of course, it’s useful for reading accounts like @davewiner that have follow-blocked me. I can search for their name and then RSS feed the Twitter search to my Google reader.

http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/the-pushbutton-web-realtime-becomes-real.html

It’s about “Push Button” without the author actually pushing buttons ;)

@sull

http://www.sarahlacy.com/sarahlacy/2008/07/hey-you-get-off.html

I know… just a coincidence…

Poetic insight.

Put control into the hands of users, let me decide who I care about the most, not your algorithms.

I do appreciate all the effort and genius that went to baking them in to the original spec though. Don’t take me wrong here.

I was being a little too subtle in my humor in the original comment. It’s a huge difference.

And in the pubsubhubbub method, the hub is definitely right in between the publisher and the subscriber.

Good place to collect data and place semantic and behavioral based ads. ; )

A system that only delivers notification is little more than a “thin” ping generator and almost inevitably suffers from the “thundering herd” problem. (i.e. As soon as notifications are distributed, the publishing site gets crushed by polling requests for the updated feeds. This is basically the same as the “Slashdot effect” and makes service management very difficult.) Note: Because the feeds contain more than one entry, serving feed requests usually consumes vastly more bandwidth than simply distributing updated entries.

A system that pushes the updated content as messages payload is able to drastically reduce the burstiness of its polling traffic and can much better manage its request load. This is true since most systems will trust that the payload is correct and will not poll-back to verify the contents. (This was part of the premise behind the old “fat-ping” proposals like FeedMesh that we pursued years ago.) Note: If “fake” updates become a problem, the Atom format provides for digital signatures that will allow the receivers of messages to validate received content without needing to poll the source feed.

bob wyman

RSS, on the other hand, is much more problematic when used in real-time applications largely because it became “mature” in an environment where only polling was considered useful. When we were developing Atom, those of us at PubSub.com and others were working hard to make the real-time web a reality and thus could see the things that Atom needed but that RSS had failed to anticipate.

bob wyman