@madpilot makes

Spurred on by Gary’s discussion on the number of micro-blogging sites around, the “Is it Distributed?” question made we wonder if we are going about this wrong. Cameron Adams was right when he said there is only one social network, so why are we flicking between a large number of them? Why aren’t we running out own?

Beyond a number of small superficial differences they all do the same thing – you add friends, post what your doing (usually in an arbitrary 140 characters or less) and read what others are doing. There really is no reason why this can’t be truly distributed, i.e. I can run my own micro-blogging site, and all my friends can run their own micro-blogging sites – all that is needed is some glue (a communication protocol) to bring it all together. The great thing about this, is we already have systems to make this happen – get your buzz-word bingo cards out people…

RESTful XML

The first part of this system is a RESTful API that allows friends to post information in your timeline and you to post to others. Everytime you post to your microblog, it will iterate through your list of friends and forward the message on to them. The same thing happens if you delete a post – if notifies all your friends to remove the post from their local database. To ensure that random people can’t spam our feeds, we can use OAuth to give “friends” permission to send us information.

Your own timeline

The reason that your microblog would need to be notified of other peoples posts would be so you can cache these posts on your own microblog, which gives you a twitter style public timeline. The advantage of this is that there is basically no database load to display YOUR feed – the only information in your database are the posts that you want to read!

Adding friends

So how can you add friends and allow others to follow you? This is actually pretty easy using OAuth – by adding your microblog to your friends microblog authorised list, they know that you need to be notified on an add or delete command. This gives us the side effect that we can manage not only who we follow but who follows us – if you want to stop someone from following you, you just de-authorise them. So what happens if a new friend adds your microblog to their timeline? A simple GET command could be made to receive all of the posts by the new friend, effectively syncing up the two databases – all future posts will obviously push to the new friend (and vice-versa) so there is no expensive polling.

Other peoples timelines

If someone has a public timeline, this is a no-brainer. Each persons microblog would just be available and others can just read it. But what about private timelines? Enter OpenID. If each of your friends provide an OpenID URL, they would be able to login to your microblog to read your private feed – no password required, but is still totally private.

Discovery services

Many twitter users scour the public timeline waiting for people to post things that they are interesting in. This is actually quite easy to implement on a distributed system – have a read only super node that everyone posts to. Voila, instant public timeline. This also means that you can easily create “channels”. Instead of only having one public timeline, you can have many based on different topics.

Unlimited extensions

One of the value-adds for Pownce is the ability to share attachments and events. In reality, all it does is provide a link to a file on a remote service. If you wanted to add this function to your microblogging site, you can quite easily – as long as you post the link to others. This means you have complete control over what your microblog does, as long as it still talks the protocol.

Advantages

1. The obvious one is you aren’t at the mercy of servers doing a twitter (ie. being up and down like a yo-yo). If your friends server goes down you miss out on their posts, but no one elses.
2. You have control over your data – you don’t have to worry about a service disappearing overnight and you not being get at it. It all on your server
3. Distributed data – your server dies and your harddrive explodes, your data can be rebuilt from the data that is stored on one of your friends databases

Disadvantages

1. If someones site is down they may miss some updates, so you would need a method for re-syncing all friends posts from a certain date – no biggie.
2. It does make completely removing your account difficult as you can’t really ensure your friends are going to respond to delete commands correctly

So what do people how don’t have their own server to run this on? This is the kicker – you can still have hosted versions of the system. This works for blogs (I host my own, but some of my friends use systems like Blogger.com) and OpenID which makes it much more accessible.

If there is some interest in this, I’m sure we can start drafting some specifications. I’d be interested in your thought.s