Sometimes, I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall trying to describe just why feed syndication and aggregation is important. In an earlier post,I tried to expand the universe of discourse by throwing out as manypossible uses as I could dream up. Joshua Porter has written areally good article about why aggregation is a big deal, even justconsidering its impact on web site design: Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content.
There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial. It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption. We need to fix it. So first, I'm going to name it:
The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.
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The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.
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Heh, it's nice to see folks finally getting around to talking seriously about newsfeeds and syndication. We've been running Syndic8 ( http://www.syndic8.com ), now in it's third year, as a way to help advance the cause.
ReplyDeleteIt's very tough to develop the sort of things that show you "stuff want to read". It's hard to ask a reader what it is they actually like and doubly hard to get them tell you want they don't like. That and who really wants to hang out with people that think in lock-step? But by publishing actual data that can be processed there are doors opening that will allow all sorts of indexing and reaggregation. This is, as others have noted, a truly fundamental change in how people will come not only access, but understand just what's out there and what it means to them.