You Can't Keep a Good Idea Down

Throughout recent history there have been many instances of people working in isolation on a problem that is of the mode and coming up with very similar conclusions. Charles Darwin is credited with the theory of evolution but he originally published in 1858 jointly with Alfred Russel Wallace after they both realised that they had similar theories. Radio has a number of claimants to the crown. Powered flight, well it wasn't the Wright Brothers I am afraid to say and don't even get me started on computers.

Theses are all high profile examples but I have seen the same things happen on many occasions in modern computing and in particular with use of the Internet. This has happened to me before and in one sense it has just happened again.

I have already described how a system such as Twitter can be opened up by creating a network of similar micro-blogging services that can communicate with each other and have already made my own test version of one of these.

I also realised that to make it more efficient it needed to have a better way of discovery for the items that were being made public and pushed to a holding system, I called these Directories and I realised that they were capable of applying security and access control at various levels. Users can subscribe to a directory and view items that are applicable to them and for which they have the relevant permission to view.

This type of thing needs to be public domain and I believe that the item needed to make this work was a protocol which we can then build the applications on. Two weeks ago a colleague of mine, Hal Newman, was at a conference run by the US Government on the use of Social Media (OGMA) and I tried to impress upon him the fact that such a protocol was a key element.

At the end of last week I made two amazing discoveries

1. Laconica the open source micro blogging platform has inter connectivity as a goal but as yet the implementation is somewhat rudimentary
2. Google has a draft inter operability protocol and sample system in place called PubSubHubbub which can do the kind of thing my directories idea would do
   

To my mind we now need to bring these two things together. Laconica is a great package that needs more exposure, Google has power and the clout to get this type of thing available. So I am going to try and show how this can happen.

And here is the Google presentation of how this can work:-



More on this as it happens.....